All,

Firstly apologies if I am posting this to the wrong forum. I am currently
having an issue convincing my customer that our processing engine is working
according to XML specifications - the issue is to do with CDATA sections.

In the input document there are various elements that contain CDATA
sections. The nature of our processing pipeline is to strip off some wrapper
XML structures (via XSLT) passing on the XML payload where these CDATA
sections reside. Now the issue is that in the output document the CDATA
content has been replaced with their equivalent characters individual
escaped i.e.

<value><![CDATA[<sender>John Smith</sender>]]></value>

becomes

<value>&lt;sender&gt;John Smith&lt;/sender&gt;</value>

Now I am well aware that these are entirely equivalent from an XML
standpoint - however the customer point of view is if they are equivalent
why has the parser altered the way the characters are escaped? On this front
it is unlikely that links to sites such as
http://www.dpawson.co.uk/xsl/sect2/cdata.html#d3164e447 will be enough to
convince them that our processor is behaving correctly - they need a formal
specification. I have searched the XML specification (to no avail) and was
wondering whether anyone could point me to the relevant place which
specifies that this is expected behaviour of the parser/xslt processor.

Kind regards,

Michael