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Java > Open Source Codes > org > w3c > dom > CDATASection


1 /*
2  * Copyright (c) 2004 World Wide Web Consortium,
3  *
4  * (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, European Research Consortium for
5  * Informatics and Mathematics, Keio University). All Rights Reserved. This
6  * work is distributed under the W3C(r) Software License [1] in the hope that
7  * it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied
8  * warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
9  *
10  * [1] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright-software-20021231
11  */
12
13 package org.w3c.dom;
14
15 /**
16  * CDATA sections are used to escape blocks of text containing characters that
17  * would otherwise be regarded as markup. The only delimiter that is
18  * recognized in a CDATA section is the "]]>" string that ends the CDATA
19  * section. CDATA sections cannot be nested. Their primary purpose is for
20  * including material such as XML fragments, without needing to escape all
21  * the delimiters.
22  * <p>The <code>CharacterData.data</code> attribute holds the text that is
23  * contained by the CDATA section. Note that this <em>may</em> contain characters that need to be escaped outside of CDATA sections and
24  * that, depending on the character encoding ("charset") chosen for
25  * serialization, it may be impossible to write out some characters as part
26  * of a CDATA section.
27  * <p>The <code>CDATASection</code> interface inherits from the
28  * <code>CharacterData</code> interface through the <code>Text</code>
29  * interface. Adjacent <code>CDATASection</code> nodes are not merged by use
30  * of the <code>normalize</code> method of the <code>Node</code> interface.
31  * <p> No lexical check is done on the content of a CDATA section and it is
32  * therefore possible to have the character sequence <code>"]]&gt;"</code>
33  * in the content, which is illegal in a CDATA section per section 2.7 of [<a HREF='http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xml-20040204'>XML 1.0</a>]. The
34  * presence of this character sequence must generate a fatal error during
35  * serialization or the cdata section must be splitted before the
36  * serialization (see also the parameter <code>"split-cdata-sections"</code>
37  * in the <code>DOMConfiguration</code> interface).
38  * <p ><b>Note:</b> Because no markup is recognized within a
39  * <code>CDATASection</code>, character numeric references cannot be used as
40  * an escape mechanism when serializing. Therefore, action needs to be taken
41  * when serializing a <code>CDATASection</code> with a character encoding
42  * where some of the contained characters cannot be represented. Failure to
43  * do so would not produce well-formed XML.
44  * <p ><b>Note:</b> One potential solution in the serialization process is to
45  * end the CDATA section before the character, output the character using a
46  * character reference or entity reference, and open a new CDATA section for
47  * any further characters in the text node. Note, however, that some code
48  * conversion libraries at the time of writing do not return an error or
49  * exception when a character is missing from the encoding, making the task
50  * of ensuring that data is not corrupted on serialization more difficult.
51  * <p>See also the <a HREF='http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-DOM-Level-3-Core-20040407'>Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Core Specification</a>.
52  */
53 public interface CDATASection extends Text JavaDoc {
54 }
55
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