xml-dev - #cdata?

[Lars Marius Garshol <larsga@step.de>]

(I post this here since it's XML-relevant and I know at least some of
the XPointer/XLink WG members read this list.)

I'm currently writing a toy XPointer implementation in Python (which
will quite possibly become serious later) and have to say I'm impressed
with the XPointer specification. Very clear descriptions and a nice
syntax.

However, I'm rather surprised that the 19980303 WD allows pointers to
distinguish nodes of type #cdata, that is, CDATA marked sections, so 
that 

root().child(3,#cdata)

points to the third CDATA section that's a direct child of the document
element.

The reason I'm surprised that this is in the WD is that to support this
the XPointer implementation will have to ride on top of a parser that
reports CDATA sections as a distinct syntactic construct, instead of
classing it as text, which is the usual solution. SAX does not do this,
nor does the DOM level 1 (WD 19980416) AFAICS.

I also have problems seeing the utility of this feature.

Can anyone comment on on whether it will be an XPointers feature in
future WDs and if so why?

--Lars M.

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