xml-dev - Re: PCDATA

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

At 03:06 PM 7/19/99 -0400, John Martin wrote:
>I have heard three different definitions of PCDATA so far.
>
>1)  The book called XML: A Primer by Simon St. Laurent defines it as
>follows:
>
>"parsed character data (#PCDATA)" - Parsed character data is text that
>will be examined by the parser for entities and markup.  Parsed
>character data should not contain any &, <, or > characters; these need
>to be represented by the &amp; &lt; and &gt; entities, respectively.

I don't know where I got it my definition originally, but my handy copy of
Charles Goldfarb's _SGML Handbook_ says (on page 140:8 and 277:15, where it
seems to be part of the ISO 8879 text)

4.229 PCDATA: Parsed character data

CDATA (at 254:14 and 140:13) is just character data.

Basically, it looks like the difference is that markup (elements,
attributes, entities) is recognized in areas declared as parsed character
data but not in areas declared just plain character data.

Fun stuff!

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer / Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
Sharing Bandwidth / Cookies
http://www.simonstl.com

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