Re: CDATA by any other name... (was The raw and the cooked)

Henry S. Thompson (ht@cogsci.ed.ac.uk)
30 Oct 1998 16:08:45 +0000

<david@megginson.com> writes:

> So, Henry's asking whether this is valid:
>
> <!DOCTYPE a [
> <!ELEMENT a (b, c)>
> <!ELEMENT b EMPTY>
> <!ELEMENT c EMPTY>
> ]>
> <a><![CDATA[ ]><b/><c/></a>
>
> [good analysis deleted]

What he said. The DOM made a serious mistake here in my opinion: it's
stranded in no-person's-land between raw and cooked, without being
either. It's not cooked, because it gives you EntityReference and
CDATA nodes. It's not raw, because it DOESN'T give you character
entity references.

To John Cowan:

My original illustrates the point: if you use the presence of the
CDATA node in the DOM tree to argue against the validity of the above
based on "Elements with element content can
only have S between the tags, and CDATA elements aren't S" then why
doesn't this apply to EntityReference elements as well, since THEY
clearly aren't S either?

ht

-- 
  Henry S. Thompson, HCRC Language Technology Group, University of Edinburgh
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