Re: A7: CDATA, RCDATA, TEMP marked sections?

At 06:23 PM 10/3/96 CDT, Michael Sperberg-McQueen wrote:
>On 9 October 1996, the ERB will vote to decide the following question.
>A non-binding preliminary vote indicates the question needs further
>discussion in the work group.
>
>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. It should be distressing to us that there could be some valid XML
documents that look better if the browser did NOT use a proper XML parser
(which should throw away comments).

I think that a rigorous specification would be an obvious feature to roll
into SGML-NG.

On the other hand, documents that used this feature would usually not be
SGML compatible, or compatible with SGML tools. You would have to run them
through an SGMLizer that encoded the non SGML data in an SGML-compatible way.

 Paul Prescod

Received on Friday, 4 October 1996 17:41:50 UTC