Allow CDATA in <t> elements

[proycon]

Not sure if this is already the case.

[kosloot]

For now, this doesn't look to be a good or useful feature.
e.g. do we translate the CDATA into text? and what to do on output?
What does text() deliver?

Don't implement unless REALLY needed.

[proycon]

Agreed, idea discarded, we won't implement this.

[kosloot]

Why????

[proycon]

It's still something to investigate, as this keeps popping up, and by no means settled. I opened it in response to another user enquiry who expected he could use CDATA. I wonder to what extend strictly disallowing CDATA violates XML specs/conventions.

From W3.org: [Definition: CDATA sections may occur anywhere character data may occur; they are used to escape blocks of text containing characters which would otherwise be recognized as markup.

[kosloot]

Well,
Every FoLiA document is valid XML.
This does not imply that every XML construct is valid FoLiA !

My biggest concerns are:

• does allowing CDATA mean that "empty" text is no longer forbidden?
• if so: what should the text() of str() methods return?
• in a CDATA you can stuff whatever you want. Base64 encode movies, pictures, scans of books...
  This doesn't help anyone using the FoLiA, imho
• we could handle CDATA as 'garbage in, garbage out' but I am sure that users will ask for (lib)folia methods extracting or inserting such garbage. A slippery slope!
• The danger is, that users create a minimal FoLiA with all useful stuff in CDATA and 'unreachable' for other users. Like PDF containing complete OCR images.

So: is there a concrete use case, that cannot be resolved in other ways?

[proycon]

Closing this, idea discarded...