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- From: Paul Grosso <pgrosso@arbortext.com>
- To: "'XML Developers' List'" <xml-dev@ic.ac.uk>
- Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 13:46:56 -0600
At 14:28 1999 03 24 -0500, David Megginson wrote:
>Bill la Forge writes:
> > Again, is anyone aware of why CDATA is preserved by the DOM?
> > What was the reasoning behind this decision? Other things, like
> > whitespace within an element tag or even attribute order, are not
preserved.
> > Why then was CDATA?
>
>I would guess that the DOM WG believed that users of XML editors and
>repositories would want to see CDATA section boundaries and comments
>survive a round trip in and out of the tools. Personally, I am
>extremely skeptical, but I have heard this argument many times from
>the employees of the vendors themselves.
As such a vendor, I hear this from our customers.
When authoring a document, the user may want to know there
is a region into which s/he can paste stuff containing < and &
characters and know they won't be interpreted as markup. True,
the editing application can magically escape them (e.g., <)
as part of the paste operation, but what if the user is using
Notepad to copy a parsable XML example into an XML document?
Having to escape the special characters destroys the ability
to have that data remain parsable/validatable at the same time
as embedded in the larger document, and that destroys an important
reuse/multipurpose feature otherwise available in XML. (Think
of a dynamic XML document that allows you to "verify as well-formed"
the content of any <sample-xml> element in your tutorial document.)
The point is that the user-author inserted the CDATA section for
a reason, and they might well want it to stay there.
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