[XML-SIG] Change in reporting of CDATA sections

[Bob Kline]

On Tue, 18 May 2004, "Martin v. Löwis" wrote:

> Bob Kline wrote:
> > We recently upgraded our servers from Python 2.2 to Python 2.3, and we
> > noticed a change in the way xml.dom.minidom returns CDATA sections.  In
> > 2.2 the parser returned CDATA sections as TEXT_NODE objects.  In 2.3
> > this changed to CDATA_SECTION_NODE.  Could someone direct us to any
> > online discussion behind the decision to make this change?  
> 
> There was no online discussion of this specific change. Instead, it
> came about as a side effect of the new expatbuilder module, which was
> announced with PyXML 0.8.

Martin:

Thanks for your reply.

> 
> Why do you ask?

Because I always like to find out as much as I can about the rationale
for interface designs and specs for the APIs that I use.  And I like to
know why software behaves the way it does (including an understanding of
which parts behave the way they do because the specifications behind the
software say they must behave that way, and which parts behave the way
they do by "chance" -- that is, the programmer was writing code in the
absence of or in contradiction to a clear specification for the
implemented behavior).  I like to think that when a software package
changes its behavior it does so because of a conscious decision made at
some level for a good reason.  I was hoping that someone in this forum 
might know where I could read about that reason (and ideally, the 
reasoning behind the old behavior, too).

-- 
Bob Kline
mailto:bkline at rksystems.com
http://www.rksystems.com