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xmlxsltcdata

What is the reason that CDATA even exists?

I often see people asking XML/XSLT related questions here that root in the inability to grasp how CDATA works (like this one).

I wonder - why does it exist in the first place? It's not that XML could not do without it, everything you can put into a CDATA section can be expressed as "native" (XML-escaped).

I appreciate that CDATA potentially makes the resulting document a bit smaller, but let's face it - XML is verbose anyway. Small XML documents can be achieved more easily through compression, for example.

For me, CDATA breaks the clean separation of markup and data since you can have data that looks like markup to the unaided eye, which I find is a bad thing. (This may even be one of the things that encourages people to inadequately apply string processing or regex to XML.)

So: What good reason is there to use CDATA?

Solution

  • CDATA sections are just for the convenience of human authors, not for programs. Their only use is to give humans the ability to easily include e.g. SVG example code in an XHTML page without needing to carefully replacing every < with &lt; and so on.

    That is for me the intended use. Not to make the resulting document a few bytes smaller because you can use < instead of &lt;.

    Also again taking the sample from above (SVG code in xhtml) it makes it easy for me to check the source code of the XHTML file and just copy-paste the SVG code out without again needing to back-replace &lt; with <.