RE: CDATA sections in W3C XML Infoset

[Richard Tobin <richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>]

> The DOM *will* change to accomodate the InfoSet by a parse-time
> option to throw away CDATA section markers,

I hope the DOM does do this, but for the reason that users want it,
not "to accommodate the Infoset".  As I have said before, Infoset
conformance does not require anything of the kind.

> 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'm not sure which quote you're referring to, but the sentiment is
just right.  In considering the specifications that might use the
Infoset, the core WG [*] concluded that (in Paul Grosso's words) the
DOM is the outlier.  There is a group of specifications including
XPath, XSLT, XML Query, XML Schemas and XInclude that have very
similar data model requirements.  The DOM needs more, and those extras
are closer to the syntactic level.  (Of course, applications like
editors go even further in that direction, in some cases even to the
extent of operating on not-well-formed documents, but it was always
clear that the Infoset would not cover all of their needs.)  Thus the
needs of the DOM in some cases lost out to other considerations.

One could imagine an extended Infoset covering the needs of the DOM,
and the DOM group could perfectly well decide to produce one and use
it to define its object model.  I've no idea whether they are likely
to do this.

[*] I'm not making an official core WG statement here, just describing
my recollection of the history.

-- Richard