THE most important use case IMNSHO is for documenting markup. I like to
be able to write:
<programlisting language="XML"><![CDATA[
<?xml version="1.0">
<!DOCTYPE foo SYSTEM "bar.dtd">
<foo>
<title>Some <title></title>
</foo>
]]></programlisting>
How is above mentioned code snippet, more useful than writing within comments like below,
<programlisting language="XML">
<!--<?xml version="1.0">
<!DOCTYPE foo SYSTEM "bar.dtd">
<foo>
<title>Some <title></title>
</foo>-->
</programlisting>
one has a source code listing in the document and one does not, as it has been commented out, these are completely different things.
a CDATA section plays the same role as a verbatim environment in latex or raw strings in python or ...
Yes it's syntactic sugar but for a human reader of the source it is a lot easier to read a (say) _javascript_ listing as _javascript_ rather than _javascript_ in which every < is written as <
It seems to me that, XML comments are meant to be ignored (they're sort of noise). Is that the reason, or only reason to use CDATA section instead?
Comments are for commenting things out, CDATA sections are for including things. You can always replace a CDATA section by something else, but that's unlikely to be a comment.
David
