• To: Gustaf Liljegren <gustaf.liljegren@b...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: How important are CDATA sections?
• From: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>
• Date: Sat, 05 Jul 2003 14:57:16 -0700
• In-reply-to: <3.0.6.32.20030704233806.00b1b2c0@p...>
• References: <3.0.6.32.20030704233806.00b1b2c0@p...>
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Gustaf Liljegren wrote:
> 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.

No, you could use numeric entities. Or define "<" and "&" in the DTD or 
internal subset.

>...
> 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.

May Goldfarb save us from those who want to protect us from the syntax 
by making the syntax so unbearable that we need protection!

  Paul Prescod

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