RE: identity transform - include CDATA's, etc

> however this is not a true identity transform since CDATA 
> sections enclosed 
> in the original xml document in <![CDATA[ ]]> is output as regular 
> characters.  

It is an identity transform of the data model. There are things in the
original source document that are not represented in the data model, and
these cannot be preserved through a transformation because they are lost
even before the transformation starts. These include:

CDATA sections
entity references
character encoding
attribute order
DOCTYPE declarations
spaces around "=" signs in attributes

and lots of other similar details.

The thinking is that these are conveniences when creating an XML
document but they should not be used to represent the information
content of the document - they are superficial features of the external
representation of the XML.

Michael Kay


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