Re: XPATH evaluation

2011/6/17, Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net>:

> On 06/17/2011 10:55 AM, Radosław Smogura wrote:
>
>> XML canonization preservs whitespaces, if I remember
>> well, I think there is example.
>>
>> In any case if I will store image in XML (I've seen this), preservation of
>> white spaces and new lines is important.
>
> If you store images you should encode them anyway, in base64 or hex.

Whitespace that is not at certain obviously irrelevant places (such as
right after "<", between attributes, outside of the whole document,
etc), and that is not defined to be irrelevant by some schema (if the
parser is schema-aware), is relevant. You cannot just muck around with
it and consider that correct.

> More generally, data that needs that sort of preservation should
> possibly be in CDATA nodes.

CDATA sections are just syntactic sugar (a form of escaping):

<URL:http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-infoset/#omitted>

"Appendix D: What is not in the Information Set
[..]
19. The boundaries of CDATA marked sections."

Therefore, there is not such thing as a "CDATA node" that would be
different from "just text" (Infoset-wise).

Note that that does not mean that binary data is never supposed to be
altered or that all binary data is to be accepted: e.g., whether
newlines are represented using "\n", "\r", or "\r\n" is irrelevant;
also, binary data that is not valid according to the used encoding
must of course not be accepted.

Nicolas

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