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Re: Why isn't the semicolon a reserved character?

• From: Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org>
• To: John Cowan <johnwcowan@gmail.com>
• Date: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 15:41:23 -0400

On Sun, 2014-03-16 at 01:08 -0400, John Cowan wrote:
[...]
> A better question is "Why is ]]> reserved?"  Ken Holman's answer is that
> doing so allows CDATA sections to contain CDATA section openers, but I
> doubt if this is very useful.  The real answer is "Because that's the way
> SGML did it." 

I suspect it's because SGML had other kinds of marked section - you
could have a conditional section,
<![%IfNoShoes;[ I am happy today! ]]>
and these could nest.

But the SGML CDATA handling always seemed a little odd to me.

>  In order to keep MicroXML a subset of XML, the former
> requires all > characters to be escaped just in case.

Last time I checked MicroXML did not have attribute value normalization
and was therefore not a strict subset of XML. But maybe that's excessive
pedantry on my part.

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

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Why isn't the semicolon a reserved character?
    • From: John Cowan <johnwcowan@gmail.com>

• References:
  • Why isn't the semicolon a reserved character?
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>
  • Re: Why isn't the semicolon a reserved character?
    • From: John Cowan <johnwcowan@gmail.com>