libjava/org/w3c/dom/CDATASection.java

   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 "]]&gt;" 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 }