xml-dev - RE: <XML:SCRIPT>

[David Megginson <david@megginson.com>]

Simon St.Laurent writes:

 > I understand CDATA sections; I'm just depressed and fairly cranky
 > that people still consider them a worthwhile tool that deserves
 > regular use.  Yecch.  To think at one time I thought hiding
 > JavaScript inside comments to shield it from old browsers was ugly.

They're not quite the same -- CDATA sections simply shift the parsing
mode, so that the only delimiter recognised is "]]>" (or "]]").  That
said, they are purely lexical and somewhat unattractive, and exist
only as a convenience for people who write XML in regular text
editing tools.

Once there are XML editing tools in wide-spread use, they will
probably hide this, so naive authors will just type

  if (x < y && a > b) {
    ...
  }

and the editing software will write it to the XML file as

  if (x &lt; y &amp;&amp; a &gt; b) {
    ...
  }


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david@megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)