Re: What characters can go into a CDATA section and a comment? (I found inconsistencies)

On Thu, 24 Mar 2022 at 09:18, Mukul Gandhi <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 24, 2022 at 1:58 PM Peter Flynn <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> THE most important use case IMNSHO is for documenting markup. I like to
>> be able to write:
>>
>> <programlisting language="XML"><![CDATA[
>> <?xml version="1.0">
>> <!DOCTYPE foo SYSTEM "bar.dtd">
>> <foo>
>>    <title>Some &lt;title></title>
>> </foo>
>> ]]></programlisting>
>>
>
> How is above mentioned code snippet, more useful than writing within
> comments like below,
>
> <programlisting language="XML">
> <!--<?xml version="1.0">
> <!DOCTYPE foo SYSTEM "bar.dtd">
> <foo>
>    <title>Some &lt;title></title>
> </foo>-->
> </programlisting>
>


one has a source code listing in the document and one does not, as it has
been commented out, these are completely different things.



a CDATA section plays the same role as a verbatim environment in latex or
raw strings in python or ...

Yes it's syntactic sugar but for a human reader of the source it is a lot
easier to read a (say) javascript listing as javascript rather than
javascript in which every < is written as &lt;



>
> It seems to me that, XML comments are meant to be ignored (they're sort of
> noise). Is that the reason, or only reason to use CDATA section instead?
>

Comments are for commenting things out, CDATA sections  are for including
things. You can always replace a CDATA section by something else, but
that's unlikely to be a comment.

David


>
> --
> Regards,
> Mukul Gandhi
>