Karr, David wrote:
> I pointed out to a client that they're seeing failures parsing XML
> because some of the element content that they're producing contains
> characters illegal in XML content, like "&" (unencoded). They
> acknowledged that should be fixed, but they also said they could
> instead enclose all content with CDATA blocks. That seems bizarre to
> me, but I'm not sure I can immediately come up with all the cogent
> arguments against that. Can someone summarize specifically why you
> should NOT do that?
If they aren't willing to consider what characters exist in their data,
they can't guarantee that the string "]]>" can't exist, delimiting their
CDATA section and breaking their document. I've never liked CDATA
sections and rarely use them - I think they're generally a lazy answer
to a simple question.
Marcus
