<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!--[ CDATA Section ]-->
<!-- $Date: 2001-06-01 07:15:37 -0400 (Fri, 01 Jun 2001) $ $Revision: 225913 $ -->
<interface name="CDATASection" inherits="Text" id="ID-667469212">
  <descr><p>CDATA sections are used to escape blocks of text containing 
	characters that would otherwise be regarded as markup. The only 
	delimiter that is recognized in a CDATA section is the "]]&gt;" string 
	that ends the CDATA section. CDATA sections cannot be 
	nested. Their primary purpose is for including
      material such as XML fragments, without needing to escape all
      the delimiters.</p><p>The <code>DOMString</code> attribute of the
      <code>Text</code> node holds the text that is contained by the CDATA
      section. Note that this <emph>may</emph> contain characters
      that need to be escaped outside of CDATA sections and that, depending on
      the character encoding ("charset") chosen for serialization, it may be
      impossible to write out some characters as part of a CDATA section. </p>
    <p> The <code>CDATASection</code> interface inherits from the
      <code>CharacterData</code> interface through the <code>Text</code>
      interface. Adjacent <code>CDATASection</code> nodes are not merged by
      use of the <code>normalize</code> method of the <code>Node</code>
      interface.</p>
    <note>
      <p>Because no markup is recognized within a <code>CDATASection</code>,
	character numeric references cannot be used as an escape mechanism
	when serializing. Therefore, action needs to be taken when serializing
	a <code>CDATASection</code> with a character encoding where some of
	the contained characters cannot be represented. Failure to do so would
	not produce well-formed XML.</p>
      <p>One potential solution in the serialization process is to end the
	CDATA section before the character, output the character using a 
	character reference or entity reference, and open a new CDATA section 
	for any further characters in the text node. Note, however, that some 
	code conversion libraries at the time of writing do not return an
	error or exception when a character is missing from the encoding, 
	making the task of ensuring that data is not corrupted on serialization
	more difficult.</p> 
    </note>
  </descr>
</interface>
