The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
specification (http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xml-20040204/#sec-cdata-sect) describes
them really well:
CHAPTER 5 n AJAX AND DATA EXCHANGE 112
CDATA sections MAY occur anywhere character data might occur; they are used to
escape blocks of text containing characters which would otherwise be recognized as
markup. CDATA sections begin with the string "string "]]>".
CDATA sections give you a lot of flexibility and can remove much of the worry about
encoding, which makes it easier to work with HTML content:
Smith & Smith]]>Retrieving the content from a CDATA section works exactly like retrieving it from a text
node. The book example would get encoded as follows:
The Long Road
Jonah Smith
Smith details his battles from the mailroom to the CEO of Megacorp
Time: fact or fiction
Dr. Michelle Doe
Is time just a figment of our imagination? Dr. Doe, a physicist anda
Nobel prize ...
]]>Already, the HTML is much easier to understand. Embedding that entire snippet is handled
exactly the same as it was before:
var doc = transport.responseXML.documentElement; // grabs the root node
var books = doc.
Pages:
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