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Hello all, I was hoping that the general wisdom on this list might be able to help settle a development debate we are having here. In an app we are working on, we are creating XML documents that have, as content to some elements, HTML. When writing out these documents, the elements which contain HTML wrap their content in CDATA sections to avoid having to entity-encode all of the angle brackets and ampersands. Now, as product development progressed, we found that we wanted to preserve the formatting of the HTML content, which required entity-encoding carriage returns in the HTML so that the parser would return them correctly. Naturally, the entity encodings had to appear outside of a CDATA section, so the HTML elements were now broken up into many smaller CDATA sections, separated by entity-encoded carriage returns. It was starting to look goofy, but it worked ok. Then (just for fun) we opened up our documents in a variety of XML editors (like IE5, which I know is not an editor but it does display the structure). To our surprise, the CDATA sections were showing up in the structure, whereas the entity encodings were silently converted. A debate ensued as to whether or not this was right, and whether or not our use of CDATA was "dumb". The proposed alternative was to skip CDATA altogether and just entity-encode the HTML, making it virtually illegible in a text editor but very readable in an XML editor. So, my question is should CDATA sections in an XML document be considered structural, and warrant being displayed in an XML editor, or should they be considered more like "parser control" and be silently interpreted in the same way that entity encodings are? Although we cannot change the way the current crop of XML editors behaves, it would be nice to know what the conventional wisdom *thinks* should be happening. Tom Otvos Director of Research, Pervasive Software Inc. "Try not! Do, or do not. There is no 'try'." - Yoda xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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