> Whilst I am pretty much in agreement with all of the sentiments
> expressed here, its interesting that no one has really come up with a
> compelling argument for not using CDATA to resolve this encoding
> issue. This makes it quite difficult for designers to argue against
> this approach as the OP suggests when faced with that challenge.
Encoding (as opposed to escaping) is one of the compelling reasons...
XML written as a string is often in the platform default encoding
(cp-1252 on Windows) which is then read using UTF-8 when no prolog is
present... or worse still the string contains a hand made prolog with
encoding="UTF-8" but is still written in a different encoding.
So the main compelling reasons for using a proper XML writer are:
- encoding
- escaping
- well-formedness checking
- namespace well-formed checking (I think anyway...)
"using CDATA to resolve this issue" is hacking around the problem
rather than doing the right thing, and will always cause problems down
the line.
--
Andrew Welch
http://andrewjwelch.com
Kernow: http://kernowforsaxon.sf.net/
