>The CDATA idea does work for what it is intended to be used for.
>Text with no subelements, entity references or other markup.
>In default SGML, a CDATA element's data is terminated by "</"
>followed by any valid name start character (or the end of the
>entity). In XML, there is no name-start checking and every
>start-tag must have a corresponding end-tag.
Excellent. Now we know what the SGML developers were thinking - now we just
need to figure out why this is relevant to XML. Why is it so difficult to
create CDATA elements - which have to be marked clearly in XML by start and
end tags? There is no need in XML to stop CDATA at just any </ sequence, just
the </ sequence which turns into the full end tag of the element. Of course,
this would probably break compatibility with all my favorite SGML parsers, at
least if I wrote scripts that used </ at some point.
Oh well. We'll have to see what all the 'bozos' think of this when they start
working with it. I suspect that more than a few will write < as <, > as
>, and & as &. Should make for some very readable code.
Simon St.Laurent
Dynamic HTML: A Primer