/* * Copyright (c) 2000 World Wide Web Consortium, * (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institut National de * Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, Keio University). All * Rights Reserved. This program is distributed under the W3C's Software * Intellectual Property License. This program is distributed in the * hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even * the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR * PURPOSE. * See W3C License http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/ for more details. */ package org.w3c.dom; /** * CDATA sections are used to escape blocks of text containing characters that * would otherwise be regarded as markup. The only delimiter that is * recognized in a CDATA section is the "]]>" string that ends the CDATA * section. CDATA sections cannot be nested. Their primary purpose is for * including material such as XML fragments, without needing to escape all * the delimiters. * <p>The <code>DOMString</code> attribute of the <code>Text</code> node holds * the text that is contained by the CDATA section. Note that this may * contain characters that need to be escaped outside of CDATA sections and * that, depending on the character encoding ("charset") chosen for * serialization, it may be impossible to write out some characters as part * of a CDATA section. * <p> The <code>CDATASection</code> interface inherits from the * <code>CharacterData</code> interface through the <code>Text</code> * interface. Adjacent <code>CDATASection</code> nodes are not merged by use * of the <code>normalize</code> method of the <code>Node</code> interface. * Because no markup is recognized within a <code>CDATASection</code>, * character numeric references cannot be used as an escape mechanism when * serializing. Therefore, action needs to be taken when serializing a * <code>CDATASection</code> with a character encoding where some of the * contained characters cannot be represented. Failure to do so would not * produce well-formed XML.One potential solution in the serialization * process is to end the CDATA section before the character, output the * character using a character reference or entity reference, and open a new * CDATA section for any further characters in the text node. Note, however, * that some code conversion libraries at the time of writing do not return * an error or exception when a character is missing from the encoding, * making the task of ensuring that data is not corrupted on serialization * more difficult. * <p>See also the <a href='http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-DOM-Level-2-Core-20001113'>Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Core Specification</a>. */ public interface CDATASection extends Text { }