[jdom-interest] CDATA sections?

[Gary Lynn Kerbaugh]

Hi all,

   Forgive me. I am a lurker. Worse, I'm an untrained programmer; a
mathematician by training. I subscribed to the list to learn something about
XML from an incredible collection of people. Where else could I read the
musings of the people who taught me Java I/O and servlets, for instance.
What an experience!

   I couldn't begin to anticipate the uses of JDOM. I doubt that the authors
of XML could have guessed at even a fraction of the uses to which it has
been and will be applied. What began as a quest to control structure seems
to me to be evolving into a powerful capacity to structure program control.
The theoretical nature of my training (certainly not programming experience)
compels me to offer my .02 cents to the CDATA discussion. (no typo--two
hundredths of a penny--mathematician, remember?)

   CDATA gives an application the ability to turn off the parser for a
period. An attribute could specify a process to handle the data. The
requirement that the parser look ahead to find the end of the CDATA section
seems to offer a powerful control structure rather than being a liability.
With the advent of web applications, essentially numerous programs working
together, the ability to pass control to another process with arbitrarily
structured parameters seems destined to be important. The awesome talent
here could think of myriad ways to accomplish anything that I could think
of, but I see this talent creating uses for such control that make asp and
jsp pale in comparison.

   Please forgive my untrained ramblings, but the idealist in me sees the
elimination of this potential as devolution. I wish that I had more than
philosophy to share because I'm eternally grateful for all that you've
shared with me.
-- 
Gary Kerbaugh
gkerbaugh at earthlink.net
A computer scientist is someone who, when told to "Go to Hell", sees the
"go to", rather than the destination, as harmful. 

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