/*
 * Copyright (c) 2004 World Wide Web Consortium,
 *
 * (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, European Research Consortium for
 * Informatics and Mathematics, Keio University). All Rights Reserved. This
 * work is distributed under the W3C(r) Software License [1] in the hope that
 * it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied
 * warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
 *
 * [1] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright-software-20021231
 */

package org.w3c.dom;

/**
 * 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 "]]>" 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>The <code>CharacterData.data</code> attribute holds the text that is 
 * contained by the CDATA section. Note that this <em>may</em> 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>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> No lexical check is done on the content of a CDATA section and it is 
 * therefore possible to have the character sequence <code>"]]&gt;"</code> 
 * in the content, which is illegal in a CDATA section per section 2.7 of [<a href='http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xml-20040204'>XML 1.0</a>]. The 
 * presence of this character sequence must generate a fatal error during 
 * serialization or the cdata section must be splitted before the 
 * serialization (see also the parameter <code>"split-cdata-sections"</code> 
 * in the <code>DOMConfiguration</code> interface). 
 * <p ><b>Note:</b> 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 ><b>Note:</b> 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>See also the <a href='http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-DOM-Level-3-Core-20040407'>Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Core Specification</a>.
 */
public interface CDATASection extends Text {
}