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Re: Tradeoffs of XML encoding by enclosing all content in CDAT

• From: "Andrew Welch" <andrew.j.welch@g...>
• To: "Fraser Goffin" <goffinf@g...>
• Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2008 10:30:38 +0100

> Whilst I am pretty much in agreement with all of the sentiments
> expressed here, its interesting that no one has really come up with a
> compelling argument for not using CDATA to resolve this encoding
> issue. This makes it quite difficult for designers to argue against
> this approach as the OP suggests when faced with that challenge.


Encoding (as opposed to escaping) is one of the compelling reasons...
XML written as a string is often in the platform default encoding
(cp-1252 on Windows) which is then read using UTF-8 when no prolog is
present...  or worse still the string contains a hand made prolog with
encoding="UTF-8" but is still written in a different encoding.

So the main compelling reasons for using a proper XML writer are:

- encoding
- escaping
- well-formedness checking
- namespace well-formed checking   (I think anyway...)

"using CDATA to resolve this issue" is hacking around the problem
rather than doing the right thing, and will always cause problems down
the line.



-- 
Andrew Welch
http://andrewjwelch.com
Kernow: http://kernowforsaxon.sf.net/

• References:
  • Tradeoffs of XML encoding by enclosing all content in CDATA blocks
    • From: "Karr, David" <david.karr@w...>
  • Re: Tradeoffs of XML encoding by enclosing all contentin CDATA blocks
    • From: Felix Sasaki <fsasaki@w...>
  • Re: Tradeoffs of XML encoding by enclosing all content in CDATA blocks
    • From: "Fraser Goffin" <goffinf@g...>