1. /*

  2.  * Copyright (c) 2000 World Wide Web Consortium,

  3.  * (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institut National de

  4.  * Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, Keio University). All

  5.  * Rights Reserved. This program is distributed under the W3C's Software

  6.  * Intellectual Property License. This program is distributed in the

  7.  * hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even

  8.  * the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR

  9.  * 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. }