Abie,
you mention 3 ways the serializer could output this element. my question
is could it also output it as '<' itself, or is there something preventing
this?
There is: the requirement that when XML is written as the serialized
output, it be XML. In XML you may not have unescaped '<' characters
intended to be characters.
ie wouldn't an XML parser report '<' in the same way it would report
<, or is that the point here - that it would report these differently?
Yes, precisely. In XML, '<' is an *open markup delimiter*. If you want your
'<' to be seen as a character and not as the start of a tag, you have to
escape it. (Is this a difficult concept to grasp? The question comes up
surprisingly often.)
It's the price you pay for being able to use markup at all. XML has two
open markup delimiters: '<' (for tags) and '&' (for entity or character
references). This is actually quite a small number of reserved characters.
(There are other characters reserved in XML such as '>' and '"', but since
they don't *open* markup you can usually get away without escaping them.)
(This issue has also turned up in another current thread, the one about
counting something-or-other....)
Cheers,
Wendell
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Wendell Piez
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Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com
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Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631
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