Alex Rivera | Logout

What is the reason that CDATA even exists?

Asked 2009-11-11T10:03:46.423
16

I often see people asking XML/XSLT related questions here that root in the inability to grasp how CDATA works (like this one).

I wonder - why does it exist in the first place? It's not that XML could not do without it, everything you can put into a CDATA section can be expressed as "native" (XML-escaped).

I appreciate that CDATA potentially makes the resulting document a bit smaller, but let's face it - XML is verbose anyway. Small XML documents can be achieved more easily through compression, for example.

For me, CDATA breaks the clean separation of markup and data since you can have data that looks like markup to the unaided eye, which I find is a bad thing. (This may even be one of the things that encourages people to inadequately apply string processing or regex to XML.)

So: What good reason is there to use CDATA?

xml xslt cdata
Edit
Report

1 Answer

3

To me CDATA is just another word for lazy. When i started out with XML i used it, but nowadays i always convert data.

The best reason i can come up with is, convenience. Especially when you are using XML as some form of wrapper, to transport data from one system to another, in this case you may end up with the following.

Create XML wrapper
Convert data to XML
Put data inside wrapper
Send XML to receiver
Split XML to XML + Data in XML
Convert Data in XML to Data

Whereas using CDATA would result in not requiring the extra conversion steps.

Another usage could be to embed data without having to care about the different namespaces in the embedded data. But that is not really a great way to use it.

I've found another example of a good way to use CDATA, one that i should have thought of. It's the case when you need to embed code in an XML-file, the code is not supposed to be converted or it will not work and/or will not be easily readable.

answered 2009-11-11T10:14:03.630

Your Answer