Re: [xml-dev] The XML Infoset, Character Data and Attribute Types

[Jeni Tennison <jeni@jenitennison.com>]

Hi Dare,

> 1.) Are syntactic components like the individual characters in CDATA
> section delimiters '<![CDATA[' & ']]>' or the individual characters
> in an entity reference '&lt;' treated as significant by the
> Character Information Item[1] section of the W3C XML information set
> recommendation or not? I have long taken my cue from XPath that
> neither is significant within the data model of an XML document but
> just wanted to make sure I was not incorrect.

You're correct. The Infoset Rec says:

 "There is a character information item for each *data character* that
  appears in the document, whether literally, as a character
  reference, or within a CDATA section."
   (http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-infoset/#infoitem.character, my emphasis)

The characters in, for example, the CDATA section open delimiter
'<![CDATA[' are not data characters, but markup characters. See
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#syntax for the difference.

> 2.) Is there any dependency or interaction between the [attribute
> type] property of the attribute information[2] item and the various
> type related properties[3] the attribute information item has in the
> PSVI?

Appendix D of the XML Schema Structures Recommendation (which is
normative) states:

 "This specification does not require any destructive alterations to
  the input information set: all the information set contributions
  specified herein are additive."
                             http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-1/#infoset

That implies to me that the [attribute type] property isn't changed
during schema validation. There's no mention of the [type definition]
property being set with any reference to the [attribute type] property
(in fact, the XML Schema Rec states that schema validators can use
infosets that lack [attribute type] properties), so I don't think that
there's any interaction there.

Cheers,

Jeni

---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/