• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: How important are CDATA sections?
• From: Gustaf Liljegren <gustaf.liljegren@b...>
• Date: Fri, 04 Jul 2003 23:38:06 +0200

What is the current opinion about CDATA sections? Keep or scrap?

I wasn't doing much of SGML, but I can imagine that CDATA was useful in the
time documents were prepared largely by hand, in text editors with very
limited SGML support. Moreover, SGML didn't have the predefined entities
for < and &, so CDATA must have been the only standard alternative.

When I need to include a bit of XML in an XML document, I cut and paste it
to my favorite text editor, do a search and replace, then cut and paste it
to the document. I'm sure the process can be made faster with a script, but
it doesn't take that long.

As XML evolves, I'd be happy to see CDATA disappear. XML doesn't need any
syntax constructs only for the sake of convenience. That's what we have XML
editors for.

Gustaf

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: How important are CDATA sections?
    • From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
  • Re: How important are CDATA sections?
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
  • Re: How important are CDATA sections?
    • From: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>

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