Item 15. Build on Top of Structures, Not Syntax
Entity references, CDATA sections, character references, empty-element tags, and the like are just syntax sugar. They make it a little easier to include certain hard-to-type constructs in XML documents. They do not in any way change a document's information content. Many parsers will not even tell you whether such syntax sugar was used or not. Your documents should convey the same meaning if each of these is replaced with an equivalent representation of the same content.
XML processing can be thought of as a five-layer stack as shown in Figure 15-1. Each layer of data is processed to generate the successively more abstract, more useful layer that follows it. Binary data is converted into characters. ...
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