Re: identity transform - include CDATA's, etc

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Subject: Re: identity transform - include CDATA's, etc
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 12:15:15 -0400

Abie,

you mention 3 ways the serializer could output this element. my question is could it also output it as '<' itself, or is there something preventing this?

There is: the requirement that when XML is written as the serialized output, it be XML. In XML you may not have unescaped '<' characters intended to be characters.

ie wouldn't an XML parser report '<' in the same way it would report <, or is that the point here - that it would report these differently?

Yes, precisely. In XML, '<' is an *open markup delimiter*. If you want your '<' to be seen as a character and not as the start of a tag, you have to escape it. (Is this a difficult concept to grasp? The question comes up surprisingly often.)

It's the price you pay for being able to use markup at all. XML has two open markup delimiters: '<' (for tags) and '&' (for entity or character references). This is actually quite a small number of reserved characters. (There are other characters reserved in XML such as '>' and '"', but since they don't *open* markup you can usually get away without escaping them.)

(This issue has also turned up in another current thread, the one about counting something-or-other....)

Cheers,
Wendell


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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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Current Thread

Re: identity transform - include CDATA's, etc, (continued)
- Andrew Welch - Wed, 9 Jul 2003 04:43:08 -0400 (EDT)
- Abie Hamaoui - Wed, 9 Jul 2003 19:30:20 -0400 (EDT)
  - David Carlisle - Thu, 10 Jul 2003 04:25:10 -0400 (EDT)
  - Wendell Piez - Thu, 10 Jul 2003 12:18:43 -0400 (EDT) <=
- Abie Hamaoui - Tue, 15 Jul 2003 13:01:27 -0400 (EDT)
  - Wendell Piez - Tue, 15 Jul 2003 13:26:43 -0400 (EDT)

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