> -----Original Message-----
>
From: Francis Norton [mailto:francis@redrice.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2001 7:52 AM
> To:
John Cowan
> Cc: Richard Lanyon; xml-dev@lists.xml.org;
>
www-xml-infoset-comments@w3.org
> Subject: Re: CDATA sections in W3C XML
Infoset
>
>
>Script code.
>
> We've all learnt to
fear and loath the sight of CDATA sections being
> used to output
unbalanced markup, but I would like to suggest
> respectfully that
dropping the CDATA start and end markers out of the
> infoset as a way of
discouraging this practice is overkill.
[Speaking only for myself,
not the DOM WG or my employer ...]
CDATA Sections have been decreed
"syntax sugar" by the experts writing the InfoSet spec. The DOM has to be
useful by ordinary Joe's in the trenches, and will continue to expose CDATA
sections ... for all the reasons noted in this thread. <grin>
The
DOM will *support* the infoset by bringing terminology (and perhaps namespace
declarations) in line with the InfoSet terminology. This doesn't mean that
the DOM must deprecate CDATA Sections, entity references, etc., it simply means
that the DOM *extends* the InfoSet, as the InfoSet spec
suggests.
So, you will be able to put CDATA sections and entities in XML syntax, manipulate them with the DOM, but not validate them with Schema or query for them with XPath or XQuery or style them with XSL. I don't *think* this is a significant problem for real developers ... In the <script> example, you could query/validate/style with the <script> tag rather than the CDATA syntax sugar, right?