Strategic XML

Character References and CDATA Sections

XML documents are considered to be written using the Unicode character set. This is true no matter what character encoding is used to store or transmit them at the operating-system level. After the document is parsed by an XML parser, the character data is made available to the client application in Unicode. The full Unicode specification defines tens of thousands of characters, many of which cannot be generated directly using a normal Qwerty keyboard. XML provides the character reference facility to allow a document to include any Unicode character, even when the underlying character encoding or physical input method doesn't support it. For more resources and references to Unicode characters, see www.unicode.org ...