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Re: When did you vanish, o' CDATA section wrapper?

• From: Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org>
• To: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>
• Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2012 14:05:14 -0400

On Tue, 2012-08-21 at 17:13 +0000, Costello, Roger L. wrote:

> The XML parser ingests the document and builds a DOM tree, right?

Depends on the parser - most do not use the W3C Document Object Model
for their data structure, but e.g. just report events, or build a much
more lightweight tree.

> So the CDATA section wrapper is still in the DOM tree, right?

Not usually. The CDATA section (as David Lee said) is just an
alternative to using < and friends; most parsers will turn "
into " in the stream without necessarily reporting anything.

If you want to get CDATA out with XSLT (or XQuery 3) you can do that for
a specific element using serialization options.

CDATA sections are pretty ugly (!) and also tend to be vectors for CDATA
injection attacks, so in most cases they're best avoided.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml

• References:
  • When did you vanish, o' CDATA section wrapper?
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>