mystery #3: rendering embedded HTML

The last mystery for me for one day ;) -- this one I've heard can be
done with msxml extensions, but I'd prefer a portable solution:

Can I restore HTML that has been encoded as CDATA escaped PCDATA?

Here's a scenario: Users enter free-hand (often broken) HTML into a
webform textarea edit box. Their text is wrapped in an XML envelope,
their HTML enclosed by <![CDATA[ ]]> to escape all the <>& chars and
so the broken markup will parse.  This envelope XML document is
stored, transported, retrieved and unpacked so the original
user-entered HTML can be displayed on a weblog.  This is more or less
the inverse of "disable-output-escaping": I don't want to pass literal
chars, I need to resolve entities _back_ to their literal chars.

In pure Java (JDOM/Jaxen/XPath), I can xpath the text node and print
its contents to the servlet output stream; the result will be the
HTML I expect to see and renders correctly in the browser.

In XSL, the <>& chars remain escaped; the html appears as its codes.

Is there a portable way to 'eval' a value-of string to undo the effect
of CDATA escaping?  Is this the best way to embed HTML into an XML
document?

-- 
Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@xxxxxxxxxxx> TeleDynamics Communications Inc
Business Innovations Through Open Source Systems: http://www.teledyn.com
"Computers are useless.  They can only give you answers."(Pablo Picasso)


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