[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: PCDATA vs CDATA
> Hmm, is that the only case where an XML parser might do the "wrong thing" if > it came across a document without a supporting DTD? Yes. There are some things an XML parser can't do without a DTD: - validating (obviously) - determining which whitespace is ignorable - normalising attributes and inserting default values - expanding entity references but despite those constraints it can parse the document and determine whether it is well-formed. > It seems to me that if > a document comes through without a DTD, and an element contained data not > explicitly escaped, then it would not be unreasonable to assume PCDATA and > try to parse it. However, if a DTD is there to provide more info, then use > it. I am not sure I see how it is significantly different than validating > that an element may, or may not, be a child of another element. If the parser doesn't know that the content of an element is CDATA it will very likely parse a correct document wrongly. This is not the case if it just doesn't know what children are allowed. For example, if c were declared CDATA and the parser didn't have the DTD, it would report a syntax error for <c>></c> Various other features of SGML have been omitted for the same reason, in particular start- and end-tag omission. Similarly a new syntax has been created for empty elements, because without the DTD a parser can't tell that an element must be empty. -- Richard xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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