What is "CDATA" used for in the .agf game file?

[Monsieur OUXX]

Quick quesiton. Here is an excerpt of a regular .agf file :

Code: AGS

      <Dialog>
        <ID>0</ID>
        <Name>dMulbray1</Name>
        <ShowTextParser>False</ShowTextParser>
        <Script><![CDATA[// Dialog script file
@S  // Dialog startup entry point
return
...
@8
mulbray: Goodbye.
stop
]]></Script>

What does that stand for:

Code: AGS

<![CDATA[ ... ]]

I'm confused by the single opening bracket and the double closing bracket as well. And the exclamation mark.

[JJS]

It tells the xml parser to ignore everything inside the CDATA field, so that it doesn't get interpreted as xml: http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_cdata.asp . Exlamation mark and double brackets are just how it is written.

[Crimson Wizard]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDATA
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/system.xml.xmltextwriter.writecdata.aspx

EDIT: Duh! beaten by JJS.

It tells the xml parser to ignore everything inside the CDATA field, so that it doesn't get interpreted as xml

Simply put, this allows to write any special chars there without breaking xml structure.

[Monsieur OUXX]

I had no idea CDATA was something universal, I thought it was specific to AGS; that's why I overlooked the Wikipedia article and everything else.
Thanks for the clarification, guys.