Re: Re: How can I insert 'raw' (X|XHT|HT)ML into my DOM?

On Thursday 16 January 2003 15:17, dcorbin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> > It does if you output to XML (including XHTML, of course).
>
> So is there a frowned upon solution for XML?

No - there's nothing in the DOM API that can be "recycled" for a hack like 
CDATA sections for HTML. 

And I really don't see a need for it, either, because it's no problem to parse 
an XML "snippet" (as opposed to HTML, where it's difficult enough to parse 
complete documents, let alone snippets) into a DOM with a run-of -the-mill 
XML parser and import the resulting node tree into the main DOM.

> > In HTML, there are no CDATA sections, but sometimes the need to put
> > unescaped  markup into a DOM. What's more, the semantics of a CDATA
> > section ("leave  anything in here as is" :-) more-or-less matches the
> > intended effect of  putting chunks of verbatim markup into the
> > document. So, it was kind of  reasonable to reuse the CData support in
> > the HTML DOM to support unescaped  markup.
> >
> > BTW, here's the obligatory official frown :-) I'd strongly advise you
> > to only  use the CDATA hack if there's really no other reasonable way
> > (say, you've got  predefined markup in a legacy database or something
> > like this) because  putting raw markup into an XMLC DOM has a number of
> > disadvantages: - If you're not careful, you can easily produce
> > documents that are not valid  HTML
>
> I can easily produce invalid XML (not-DTD compliant) too.

Sure - but you can't produce XML that's not wellformed (e.g. has unabalanced 
tags) as you can with the CDATA hack.

> > - DOM access methods like Document.getElementById(),
> > Document.getLinks() etc.  don't see the elements inside a CDATA node
> > - Automatic URL rewriting doesn't work for links/forms/whatever inside
> > of a  CDATA node
>
> I have a solution that is working by generating DOM objects. But it is
> VERY complex, and am at a point where I think it will be getting even more
> complex as I go forward.

That's why the CDATA hack is in there, so go ahead and use it.

> But, the official frown is noted....

Well, it's more of a caveat that you lose a couple of nice features if you use 
the CDATA hack, actually. I just couldn't resist the temptation of the first 
sentence in the original post ("Although it's officially frowned upon, ...") 
:-)

-- 
Richard Kunze 

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