All,

Thanks very much for all the helpful responses. I thought I needed to
clarify that we are not trying change our application to meet the (arguably
dubious) requirements of our customer regarding CDATA. We are just trying to
show them that our application is working to specification and hence should
not require changes. On this front I think we have the answer in the
aforementioned XPath 1.0 specification:
http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath#section-Text-Nodes.

Kind regards,

Michael


On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 10:03 AM, Mukul Gandhi <gandhi.mukul@g...>wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 4:54 PM, michael odling-smee
> <mike.odlingsmee@g...> wrote:
> >  about 5% of the elements in the source
> > document are <value/> elements not all of which contain CDATA. If we
> added
> > new CDATA sections to the output this would probably not satisfy the
> > customer either.
>
> Just to add another point. If some of input <value /> elements,
> contain CDATA markers, then it means to me, that your application
> design has thought, that CDATA was necessary on <value /> elements.
> Some of <value /> elements in your input XML don't have CDATA markers,
> and this I think, is the problem of the process, which created this
> input.
>
> But leaving the problem aside, of incompletely specified CDATA markers
> in your input, you can fix this problem completely, entirely within
> your stylesheet. You can put cdata-section-elements="value" in your
> XSLT stylesheet, and this will generate CDATA markers in all the
> <value /> elements, in the output. And this is what your application
> design thought, in the first place. So this to me, is what should be
> done.
>
> As an additional work, and if you want, you can work to improve the
> process, which is producing your input XML, so that it put's CDATA
> markers in all the <value /> elements.
>
>
> --
> Regards,
> Mukul Gandhi
>