Re: Tradeoffs of XML encoding by enclosing all content in CDATA blocks

[Marcus Carr <mcarr@allette.com.au>]

Karr, David wrote:

> I pointed out to a client that they're seeing failures parsing XML 
> because some of the element content that they're producing contains 
> characters illegal in XML content, like "&" (unencoded).  They 
> acknowledged that should be fixed, but they also said they could
> instead enclose all content with CDATA blocks.  That seems bizarre to
> me, but I'm not sure I can immediately come up with all the cogent
> arguments against that.  Can someone summarize specifically why you
> should NOT do that?

If they aren't willing to consider what characters exist in their data, 
they can't guarantee that the string "]]>" can't exist, delimiting their 
CDATA section and breaking their document. I've never liked CDATA 
sections and rarely use them - I think they're generally a lazy answer 
to a simple question.


Marcus