Re: [xsl] identity transform - include CDATA's, etc

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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 
> &lt;, 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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