[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Using CDATA sections for element content??
2/7/01 11:23:11 AM, Jerry Murray <Jmurray@I...> wrote: >A business partner has asked that we use CDATA sections for all element >content so they don't have to worry about handling special characters. > >I'd rather not since it handling special characters seems like a trivial >problem. There is a clear issue of whether the "raw" document is easier to >"read" if it uses " ...<![CDATA[ ..." as opppose to using escape sequences. >But for our application, the "raw" document will very seldom ever be view in >the text form so these distinctions are not very important. This is also a >very limited application with basically simple content. We are not using >entities or namespaces in the content so the issues associated with those >are not a factor. >Are there other issues that I have not identified? This requirement makes me suspicious that your partner isn't using a real XML parser on your output but instead is hack-parsing it with Perl regexps or the like. In that case, there are probably a bunch of hidden dependencies on things like character encodings, use of numeric character references, and even internal tag structure (a lot of hack attempts can't cope with perfectly legal things like embedded newlines in tags, and some make assumptions about what tags go on what lines). IOW, there are likely to be a lot of dependencies on purely lexical details that shouldn't really matter.
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