On 24/03/2022 05:06, Mukul Gandhi wrote:
> Hi all,
> I personally see, few similarities between purposes of CDATA
> section and a comment within the context of XML documents.
>
> I seem to clearly, understand the purpose of comments. Any text within
> comments, are only for human reading (and rarely for automated reading
> by computers. for e.g, we have XPath comment nodes).
>
> But I'd like to know, what are the use cases of CDATA sections. Any
> thoughts, shall be helpful to know.
THE most important use case IMNSHO is for documenting markup. I like to
be able to write:
<programlisting language="XML"><![CDATA[
<?xml version="1.0">
<!DOCTYPE foo SYSTEM "bar.dtd">
<foo>
<title>Some <title></title>
</foo>
]]></programlisting>
and NOT
<programlisting language="XML">
<?xml version="1.0">
<!DOCTYPE foo SYSTEM "bar.dtd">
<foo>
<title>Some &lt;title></title>
</foo>
</programlisting>
SGML had other types of Marked Section, but they did not make it into
XML because the stricter syntax made them unnecessary, and TBH they
didn't really get a lot of use, whereas CDATA sections are a mainstay.
CDATA sections are also used by many web developers unsure of exactly
/what/ a user is going to input, and exactly /when/ in subsequent
non-XML processes the markup is going to be stripped, so they use it as
a safety-net of last resort, which often goes wrong; but that seems to
be an acceptable price for them for passing the buck to someone else's code.
Peter
