Re: Is anyone using CDATA?

Peter Murray-Rust (peter@ursus.demon.co.uk)
Fri, 20 Feb 1998 06:40:32

At 20:21 19/02/98 -0800, Parik Rao wrote:
>Anyone have experiences with CDATA ? We're interested in inserting
>non-XML markup and BLOBs into XML files, and the best way seems to be
>CDATA. However, some of the parsers I've been playing around with
>(Microsoft, XMLint) don't support the CDATA element. Is CDATA handling
>required for a validating parser?

An "XML parser" must conform to the XML spec and must therefore *read
correctly* a document which includes <![CDATA[ ... ]]>

There is no requirement for a parser to DO anything with this other than to
report violations of well-formedness (or validity) as appropriate. The SAX
API does not support <![CDATA[; i.e. the output has lost any knowledge of
what bits were originally CDATA and which were escaped with &amp;, etc.

P.

Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, domestic
net connection
VSMS http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms, Virtual Hyperglossary
http://www.venus.co.uk/vhg