I completely disagree with Mike Kay on this issue: there is
nothing in
the XML specification that in any way suggests that it is
"inappropriate" to include a syntactic XML document in a
CDATA section
and I can think of several cases when it would be useful to do so.
Of course there's nothing in the XML spec about this; it's a question of
application architecture and good document design.
You can embed the serialized form of one XML document as text within
another XML document if you really must, but it's going to be much more
difficult to manage, because you need to put the text through two
parsing phases on input, and two serialization phases on output. That's
fine if you understand it and design your application around it, but an
awful lot of people seem to be using this kind of structure without
realizing the implications, and are trying to process it (in or out) in
a single pass, and they are getting into a mess as a result.
Michael Kay
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