Why should you use XML CDATA blocks?

Question

When creating XML I\'m wondering why the CDATA blocks are uses rather than just escaping the data. Is there something allowed in a CDATA block that can\'t be escaped and pla

Answer 1

It's first and most of all readability feature. XML, and SGML before it were originally meant to be human readable - believe it or not :-))

Second, for a good parser it's a perf feature. The ]]> ending is guaranteed to be the actual block ending but apart from that it's a blob.

By the book parser should also keep the info/attrib on a node representation to track that it has explicit CDATA and never ever touch a single char in it.