Re: #PCDATA definition??

Peter Flynn (pflynn@curia.ucc.ie)
Wed, 26 Oct 94 22:51:54 EDT

The only definition I could find for #PCDATA (from an HTMLPLUS draft,
I think) says:

PCDATA
"text occurring in a context in which markup and entity references
may occur"

This should be contrasted with the definition for CDATA (same source)
"text which doesn't include markup or entity references"

OK, now I'm (once again) confused. These ambiguous definitions don't really
seem to help.

I can't blame you :-) PCDATA is "Parseable Character Data" (or is it
"Parsed"?) which means it is text which can itself contain both markup
and entity references. Consider it to be the quality of text you find
in a paragraph. CDATA is "raw" character data: plain text which cannot
contain any markup.

///Peter