[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Is CDATA "structure"?
Tom Otvos wrote: > > > So, my question is should CDATA sections in an XML document be considered > structural, and warrant being displayed in an XML editor, or should they be > considered more like "parser control" and be silently interpreted in the > same way that entity encodings are? Although we cannot change the way the > current crop of XML editors behaves, it would be nice to know what the > conventional wisdom *thinks* should be happening. I'm confident that our XML 1.0 intent was that CDATA sections should be even less "physical" than entity references. They were just a markup convenience with no semantic significance. But XML editors are somewhat of a funny tool category. They are supposed to hide structure from you, "but not really." The problem is that different authors have different levels of interest in the details of the encoding. Because of this, the DOM tends to err on the side of providing more information rather than less. In other words, it requires the parser to tell the application more than has historically been the case. The long and short of it is that I don't think that there is anymore a real distinction between the "physical" and "logical"aspects of a document. You need to actually know what your downstream apps will consider significant. If you don't want to think about your downstream apps then of course you can just presume that everything is significant. The ISO world has a concept of "grove plan." This is a formal declaration of the sensitivity of a particular application. By applying a grove plan to a grove (for instance in a grove API or in a query/address) you can reduce the sensitivity of an application and thus make (e.g.) CDATA and entity reference nodes disappear. In the W3C world we just hard-code sensitivity into our APIs and query/addressing languages. So the DOM is hard-coded to support CDATA and entity references but XPath is hardcoded NOT to. Yes, that's a little confusing. If you could apply a grove plan to your text editor then YOU could decide whether CDATA sections are structural or not for your application. -- Paul Prescod - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for only himself http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge. - Grace Hopper 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/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 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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