001/* 002 * Copyright (c) 2000 World Wide Web Consortium, 003 * (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institut National de 004 * Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, Keio University). All 005 * Rights Reserved. This program is distributed under the W3C's Software 006 * Intellectual Property License. This program is distributed in the 007 * hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even 008 * the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR 009 * PURPOSE. 010 * See W3C License http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/ for more details. 011 */ 012 013package org.w3c.dom; 014 015/** 016 * CDATA sections are used to escape blocks of text containing characters that 017 * would otherwise be regarded as markup. The only delimiter that is 018 * recognized in a CDATA section is the "]]>" string that ends the CDATA 019 * section. CDATA sections cannot be nested. Their primary purpose is for 020 * including material such as XML fragments, without needing to escape all 021 * the delimiters. 022 * <p>The <code>DOMString</code> attribute of the <code>Text</code> node holds 023 * the text that is contained by the CDATA section. Note that this may 024 * contain characters that need to be escaped outside of CDATA sections and 025 * that, depending on the character encoding ("charset") chosen for 026 * serialization, it may be impossible to write out some characters as part 027 * of a CDATA section. 028 * <p> The <code>CDATASection</code> interface inherits from the 029 * <code>CharacterData</code> interface through the <code>Text</code> 030 * interface. Adjacent <code>CDATASection</code> nodes are not merged by use 031 * of the <code>normalize</code> method of the <code>Node</code> interface. 032 * Because no markup is recognized within a <code>CDATASection</code>, 033 * character numeric references cannot be used as an escape mechanism when 034 * serializing. Therefore, action needs to be taken when serializing a 035 * <code>CDATASection</code> with a character encoding where some of the 036 * contained characters cannot be represented. Failure to do so would not 037 * produce well-formed XML.One potential solution in the serialization 038 * process is to end the CDATA section before the character, output the 039 * character using a character reference or entity reference, and open a new 040 * CDATA section for any further characters in the text node. Note, however, 041 * that some code conversion libraries at the time of writing do not return 042 * an error or exception when a character is missing from the encoding, 043 * making the task of ensuring that data is not corrupted on serialization 044 * more difficult. 045 * <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>. 046 */ 047public interface CDATASection extends Text { 048}