01: /*
02: * Copyright (c) 2000 World Wide Web Consortium,
03: * (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institut National de
04: * Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, Keio University). All
05: * Rights Reserved. This program is distributed under the W3C's Software
06: * Intellectual Property License. This program is distributed in the
07: * hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even
08: * the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
09: * PURPOSE.
10: * See W3C License http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/ for more details.
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>DOMString</code> attribute of the <code>Text</code> node holds
23: * the text that is contained by the CDATA section. Note that this may
24: * contain characters that need to be escaped outside of CDATA sections and
25: * that, depending on the character encoding ("charset") chosen for
26: * serialization, it may be impossible to write out some characters as part
27: * of a CDATA section.
28: * <p>The <code>CDATASection</code> interface inherits from the
29: * <code>CharacterData</code> interface through the <code>Text</code>
30: * interface. Adjacent <code>CDATASection</code> nodes are not merged by use
31: * of the <code>normalize</code> method of the <code>Node</code> interface.
32: * Because no markup is recognized within a <code>CDATASection</code>,
33: * character numeric references cannot be used as an escape mechanism when
34: * serializing. Therefore, action needs to be taken when serializing a
35: * <code>CDATASection</code> with a character encoding where some of the
36: * contained characters cannot be represented. Failure to do so would not
37: * produce well-formed XML.One potential solution in the serialization
38: * process is to end the CDATA section before the character, output the
39: * character using a character reference or entity reference, and open a new
40: * CDATA section for any further characters in the text node. Note, however,
41: * that some code conversion libraries at the time of writing do not return
42: * an error or exception when a character is missing from the encoding,
43: * making the task of ensuring that data is not corrupted on serialization
44: * more difficult.
45: * <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>.
46: */
47: public interface CDATASection extends Text {
48: }
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