Re: Using CDATA sections for element content??

[Bob Kline <bkline@rksystems.com>]

On Wed, 7 Feb 2001, Jerry Murray wrote:

> 
> A business partner has asked that we use CDATA sections for all
> element content so they don't have to worry about handling special
> characters.
> 
> I'd rather not since it handling special characters seems like a
> trivial problem.  There is a clear issue of whether the "raw"
> document is easier to "read" if it uses " ...<![CDATA[ ..." as
> opppose to using escape sequences. But for our application, the
> "raw" document will very seldom ever be view in the text form so
> these distinctions are not very important.  This is also a very
> limited application with basically simple content.  We are not using
> entities or namespaces in the content so the issues associated with
> those are not a factor.
> Are there other issues that I have not identified?

At least one.  CDATA sections don't nest, so if your documents already
contain CDATA sections everywhere, then you'd be blocked from using them
for some other purpose (for example, wrapping documents inside XML-based
commands, which we use for IPC in our project).

-- 
Bob Kline
mailto:bkline@rksystems.com
http://www.rksystems.com