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

• From: David Carlisle <davidc@n...>
• To: david.karr@w...
• Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2008 16:29:08 +0100

> Can someone summarize specifically why you should NOT do that?

If the content of the elements are known to be character content, not
markup, it's safe enough using CDATA although it's hard to imagine any
environment other than hand authoring where it's significantly easier to
wrap the content in <![CDATA[ than it is to quote occurrences of < and &.


But it depends if that's what they really want, some people of course
quote other content like

<entry><![CDATA[<p>random <b>not </p> well formed content]]></entry>

on the grounds that it makes the parse errors go away and is easier than
fixing up the content to be well formed. That has the significant
tradeoff though that the markup is no longer markup, and any xml tools
won't see the element structure at all.

David

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• References:
  • Tradeoffs of XML encoding by enclosing all content in CDATA blocks
    • From: "Karr, David" <david.karr@w...>