(Resend) Re: A7: CDATA, RCDATA, TEMP marked sections?

> From: Paul Prescod <papresco@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca>
> 
> At 06:23 PM 10/3/96 CDT, Michael Sperberg-McQueen wrote:
> >
> >A.7 Should XML have CDATA, RCDATA, and TEMP marked sections or not?
> 
> It would be really handy to have some mechanism, to allow arbitrary non-SGML
> data (in the same character encoding). The author should be allowed to
> specify the delimiter  a la MIME or Perl. I think that this is pretty easy
> to parse, and to write, and would be a MAJOR advantage over HTML which does
> these things through <!-- comments -->.
> 
> If we do not provide such a mechanism, there is a danger that the XML
> convention will end up being the same as HTML. This convention hurts
> SGML/XML-based tools by making significant data in the document invisible
> to them.

I see no reason for TEMP, and extremely little for RCDATA.  If we decide
to accept PaulP's suggestion that we should have some way to allow, for
example, the inclusion of SGML "examples" in XML documents, then I suggest
we use 
	<![CDATA[
as a start delimiter and
	]]>
as an end delimiter.

Otherwise, rather than invent new incompatible syntax, I suggest we
just tell people to use an element with #PCDATA content, escape 
< and & (using &lt; and &amp; or some such), and indicate via the
style sheet that the element is "verbatim" (and perhaps set it in
a monospaced font).

paul

Received on Sunday, 6 October 1996 19:28:06 UTC