Re: PCDATA vs CDATA

Tom Otvos (tomo@everyware.com)
Tue, 30 Jun 1998 15:53:29 -0400

Hmm, is that the only case where an XML parser might do the "wrong thing" if
it came across a document without a supporting DTD? It seems to me that if
a document comes through without a DTD, and an element contained data not
explicitly escaped, then it would not be unreasonable to assume PCDATA and
try to parse it. However, if a DTD is there to provide more info, then use
it. I am not sure I see how it is significantly different than validating
that an element may, or may not, be a child of another element.

Tom Otvos
Director of Research, EveryWare Development Inc.
http://www.everyware.com/
"Try not! Do, or do not. There is no 'try'." - Yoda

-----Original Message-----
From: David G. Durand <david@dynamicdiagrams.com>
To: XML Dev <xml-dev@ic.ac.uk>; Tom Otvos <tomo@everyware.com>
Date: Tuesday, June 30, 1998 4:27 PM
Subject: Re: PCDATA vs CDATA

>Unmarked CDATA in an instance is not parseable without the element
declaration
>and without making all XML parsers read all DTDs to determine if CDATA
>might be found in any elements. This violates some of the design goals of
XML,
>and thus the decision was taken to eliminate CDATA content models.
>
>EMPTY has also been effectively trashed by XML's willingness to allow
<e></e>
>to represent an element <a> with an EMPTY content model.
>
>in both cases we pay a price (in convenience for CDATA and expressiveness
>for EMPTY), but we do get a system that will work well on the WWW in ways
that
>full SGML does not.
>
> -- David
>
>------------------------------------------+----------------------------
>David Durand dgd@cs.bu.edu| david@dynamicDiagrams.com
>Boston University Computer Science | Dynamic Diagrams
>http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/ | http://dynamicDiagrams.com/
> | MAPA: mapping for the WWW
> |
http://dynamicDiagrams.com/minimapa
>