> -----Original Message-----
>
From: Bob Kline [mailto:bkline@rksystems.com]
> Sent: Saturday, March 31, 2001 5:23 PM
> To:
Charles Reitzel
> Cc: xml-dev@lists.xml.org; Tim Bray
> Subject: Re:
CDATA sections in W3C XML Infoset
>
> I hope you're right.
Doesn't appear to be a universally held point of
> view, though.
From earlier in this thread [1]:
>
> > I'd take that as meaning
that the DOM does not conform to the
> > Infoset spec.
Accordingly, the DOM is what needs to be changed, not
> >
Infoset.
I can assure you (unofficially, but after having participated in
several
DOM WG discussions on this matter) that the DOM plans to support
CDATA sections for the
forseeable future. They are needed by XML
editors and databases;
the DOM API is widely used by both, so the CDATA
section support will remain
as long as they remain in the XML serialization
format.
The DOM *will* change to accomodate the InfoSet by a parse-time
option to throw
away CDATA section markers, probably by some yet-to-be
determined mappings from the
v 2.0 XPath/XSLT and Query data models to the
more "raw syntax" data model in
the DOM, some reconciliation between the
syntactical representation of
namespace declarations as attributes and their
more abstract representation in
the InfoSet, and so forth.
I
don't REALLY think there is all that much disagreement here. CDATA
sections are
a bit of a mess to use even at the pure text level; they're
useful for escaping
blocks of non-wellformed content, but dangerous because
the content might contain
the character strings that delimit CDATA
sections. Used carefully, they are useful
in certain limited
circumstances (such as Bob Kline's application) but I've
heard very little
demand for them to be supported by XPath/XSLT, XQuery,
Schema, etc.
Thus the InfoSet folks chose to leave them out. I *hope* that
Mr.
Cowan's quote means something like "better for the DOM to figure out how
to
peacefully co-exist with XPath/Query/Schema than for the other specs to
have
to wrestle with the raw syntax stuff that the DOM has to deal
with."
I'd remind people once again of the Common XML Usage Guidelines
at
http://simonstl.com/articles/cxmlspec.txt It is sortof like an
ancient map of the XML world,
with the "Common XML Core" identifying the
civilized world and all sorts of
"here be dragons" notations
denoting the Terra Incognita of
Interoperability. The InfoSet is, to
a certain extent, the W3C's
admission of the truths behind Common XML -- the
parts of XML syntax that it
doesn't include in the abstract data model are
among the most dragon-infested
regions of XML-space, especially CDATA sections
and entity
references!
[If this reply sounds a bit schizophrenic, it's because my
inner minimalist hates
CDATA sections and hope they die a painful death in
XML 2.0, but my outer
DOM/day job personna sees all the uses they have in the
real world today].