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Re: Re: Where does the "nothing left but toolkits" mythcome fr

• To: Kurt Cagle <kurt.cagle@g...>
• Subject: Re: Re: Where does the "nothing left but toolkits" mythcome from?
• From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Mon, 07 Feb 2005 06:37:03 -0500
• Cc: XML Developers List <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <6fa681b1050206105274c18b2b@m...>
• References: <Pine.LNX.4.44L0.0501280904130.20504-100000@s...> <200502032213.56841.david.lyon@c...> <4202A983.6030803@z...> <4202C65B.7000207@o...> <42038131.8080701@m...> <4204023D.8000401@o...> <42042648.3020504@m...> <e3a5cb2c05020419595e515059@m...> <1107704852.4527.116.camel@borgia> <e3a5cb2c05020609516779e7d6@m...> <6fa681b1050206105274c18b2b@m...>
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Kurt Cagle wrote:


> used for denoting that section.  I should also point out that CDATA
> sections become almost necessary when dealing with "unsafe" content -
> XML wrappers holding blog feedbacks written by people who don't have
> the first clue about why ampersands in text are bad for your
> application

I would say rather that CDATA sections are dangerously close to solving 
the problem of wrapping unsafe content; close enough that they convince 
people to use them without actually solving the problem. Three issues:

1. They cannot contain ]]>. Therefore the text must be scanned anyway to 
be safe.

2. They cannot contain characters from outside the current character set 
(though this is not really a problem if the document is written in UTF-8 
or another Unicode encoding).

3. They cannot contain most C0 control characters.

Consequently, you can't just take a random chunk of text and throw it in 
a CDATA section. You might as well as use numeric character references 
for this use case, and you'd be less likely to have problems if you did.

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo@m...
XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Re: Where does the "nothing left but toolkits" mythcome from?
    • From: Uche Ogbuji <Uche.Ogbuji@f...>
  • Re: Re: Where does the "nothing left but toolkits" myth come from?
    • From: David Lyon <david.lyon@c...>

• References:
  • xml 2.0 - so it's on the way after all?
    • From: David Lyon <david.lyon@c...>
  • Re: xml 2.0 - so it's on the way after all?
    • From: Rick Marshall <rjm@z...>
  • Re: xml 2.0 - so it's on the way after all?
    • From: Bob Foster <bob@o...>
  • Re: xml 2.0 - so it's on the way after all?
    • From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>
  • Re: xml 2.0 - so it's on the way after all?
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  • Re: xml 2.0 - so it's on the way after all?
    • From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>
  • How simple is simple enough? - was Re: xml 2.0 - so it's on the way after all?
    • From: Michael Champion <michaelc.champion@g...>
  • Where does the "nothing left but toolkits" myth come from?
    • From: Uche Ogbuji <Uche.Ogbuji@f...>
  • Re: Where does the "nothing left but toolkits" myth come from?
    • From: Michael Champion <michaelc.champion@g...>
  • Re: Re: Where does the "nothing left but toolkits" myth come from?
    • From: Kurt Cagle <kurt.cagle@g...>

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