Hello Mike, thank to your comments, I got the point.
I already had the annotated spec at hand. I looked up 3.3.1 "Attribute Types" which states StringType::='CDATA'. There is no description there and also no annotation. Since this IS something new in XML, I'd at least mention it here. It is astonishing for somebody who has some knowledge of SGML (like me) that the CDATA construct in XML differs from the one in SGML at all AND STILL USES THE SAME NAME. In SGML, a CDATA-Attribute is unparsed and not subject to any translations. As a result, the typical href's in HTML can contain something like "http://test.de?id=1&test=2";. I can't see any good reason why this has changed in XML, but maybe the intention was to disturb half of the world. The same goes for the treatment of public identifiers in XML. They W3C just forgot to introduce catalogs and now my telephone starts dialing when I try to access an XHTML-Document (since that includes a URL to w3c in its System-Identifier). Another annoying "feature" is, that SGML allows a "< " in PCDATA, XML wants to have "< ". I could easily continue with points like this. I don't want to say "why didn't they use SGML" - there is lots of shit in SGML, too. But these new points do not offer any additional benefits for endusers or parser-builders (e.g. the SAX interface allows to specify an Entity-resolver). All that leads to - in my opinion - unnecessary efforts you have to take in order to make your old content XML-ready. This isn't meant to criticise anybody at xml.apache.org. You are really doing a great job. Thanks again Armin
