Outside of a few special cases (such as wanting to make embedded content in XML human editable) CDATA should be treated as a big warning flag that the author of

Outside of a few special cases (such as wanting to make embedded content in XML human editable) CDATA should be treated as a big warning flag that the author of the code that generated the XML doesn't really understand what they are doing. There's always the issue that one day ']]>' will somehow sneak in and everything will break. The key is using a tool to generate the XML that will transparently handle things like escaping correctly instead of using templating tools designed for text or HTML output.