Preserving HTML in XML

Characters like “<” and “&” are illegal in XML elements. “<” will generate an error because the parser interprets it as the start of a new element. “&” will generate an error because the parser interprets it as the start of an character entity. Some text, like JavaScript code, contains a lot of “<” or “&” characters. To avoid errors, we need to parse the code using CDATA (Character Data) like so:

<!CDATA[
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
]]>

This is different from commenting. Commenting skips the whole section entirely, like so:

<!–
xxxxxxxxxx
–>

which is just like HTML comments.

Author: bpeh

Bernard Peh is a great passioner of web technologies and one of the co-founder of Sitecritic.net Website Design and Reviews. He works with experienced web designers and developers everyday, developing and designing commercial websites. He specialises mainly in SEO and PHP programming. View all posts by bpeh