Re: [xsl] CDATA Handling

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 06:52 AM 1/6/2009, David wrote:
> > May be it is easier to pick the inside text of CDATA.
>
> If you are using XML input, it's best to process it with XML tools, in
> which case processing two identical inputs should have the same
> difficulty. Admittedly if you are not really using XML, and just grabing
> bits of text using string handling then specifying all sorts of non XML
> constraints, such as use of CDATA or use of particular attribute quoting
> style, and particular character encoding, may, possibly make sense,
> perhaps.

But of course this wouldn't be a conforming XML application; it would 
just pretend to be "XML".

The bottom line is that CDATA marked sections look like markup, but 
they're not. They are lexical cruft, having nothing to do with 
information as modeled in an XML system. They express nothing in XML 
that couldn't be expressed otherwise. They could have been left out 
of XML altogether and the semantics of XML as an information modeling 
and processing technology would be the same.

But because they're there, and because they look like markup, and 
because they do mean something to a parser, they offer potentials for 
headaches. When used properly, as a merely syntactic alternative to 
escaping markup characters, they're a harmless convenience. When they 
invade processing semantics, they're an accident waiting to happen.

Cheers,
Wendell



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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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