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Re: CDATA by any other name... (was The raw and the cooked)

• From: Paul Prescod <papresco@t...>
• To: xml-dev@i...
• Date: Tue, 03 Nov 1998 07:47:14 -0600

Rick Jelliffe wrote:
> 
> For example, I cannot see why a smart editor could not use the CDATA section
> to cofine editing to whatever the repertoire of the character set of the
> encoding attribute of the XML header says. 

Because it would be redundant. If the XML header says what characters are
available then the editor can directly enforce that constraint.

Overloading markup in this way is, in my opinion, a bad idea. It can do
nothing but bring harm in the long term because no two applications will
agree on the overloaded semantics and thus no two applications will treat
the data in the same way.

> The <![JAVA[ ]]> idea was not that JAVA would be a "CDATA marked section",
> but an "RCDATA marked section", which means that special character
> references and entity references would be allowed. 

This would eliminate the most interesting thing about CDATA sections:
character suppression. Making <![JAVA[ RCDATA is going in the wrong
direction. Rather it should be a CDATA-on-steriods that even ignores CDEnd
("]]>") and only looks for something like ]JAVA]> to end the section.

 Paul Prescod  - http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco

"I always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more
specific." --Lily Tomlin



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