1. /*

  2.  * Copyright (c) 2004 World Wide Web Consortium,

  3.  *

  4.  * (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, European Research Consortium for

  5.  * Informatics and Mathematics, Keio University). All Rights Reserved. This

  6.  * work is distributed under the W3C(r) Software License [1] in the hope that

  7.  * it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied

  8.  * warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

  9.  *

  10.  * [1] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright-software-20021231

  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>CharacterData.data</code> attribute holds the text that is 

  23.  * contained by the CDATA section. Note that this <em>may</em> contain characters that need to be escaped outside of CDATA sections and 

  24.  * that, depending on the character encoding ("charset") chosen for 

  25.  * serialization, it may be impossible to write out some characters as part 

  26.  * of a CDATA section.

  27.  * <p>The <code>CDATASection</code> interface inherits from the 

  28.  * <code>CharacterData</code> interface through the <code>Text</code> 

  29.  * interface. Adjacent <code>CDATASection</code> nodes are not merged by use 

  30.  * of the <code>normalize</code> method of the <code>Node</code> interface.

  31.  * <p> No lexical check is done on the content of a CDATA section and it is 

  32.  * therefore possible to have the character sequence <code>"]]>"</code> 

  33.  * in the content, which is illegal in a CDATA section per section 2.7 of [<a href='http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xml-20040204'>XML 1.0</a>]. The 

  34.  * presence of this character sequence must generate a fatal error during 

  35.  * serialization or the cdata section must be splitted before the 

  36.  * serialization (see also the parameter <code>"split-cdata-sections"</code> 

  37.  * in the <code>DOMConfiguration</code> interface). 

  38.  * <p ><b>Note:</b> Because no markup is recognized within a 

  39.  * <code>CDATASection</code>, character numeric references cannot be used as 

  40.  * an escape mechanism when serializing. Therefore, action needs to be taken 

  41.  * when serializing a <code>CDATASection</code> with a character encoding 

  42.  * where some of the contained characters cannot be represented. Failure to 

  43.  * do so would not produce well-formed XML.

  44.  * <p ><b>Note:</b> One potential solution in the serialization process is to 

  45.  * end the CDATA section before the character, output the character using a 

  46.  * character reference or entity reference, and open a new CDATA section for 

  47.  * any further characters in the text node. Note, however, that some code 

  48.  * conversion libraries at the time of writing do not return an error or 

  49.  * exception when a character is missing from the encoding, making the task 

  50.  * of ensuring that data is not corrupted on serialization more difficult.

  51.  * <p>See also the <a href='http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-DOM-Level-3-Core-20040407'>Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Core Specification</a>.

  52.  */

  53. public interface CDATASection extends Text {

  54. }