CFML not necessarily valid XML?

[Michiel1978]

I'm new to CF, just started today with a book. I was wondering about something:
in some examples and also in the examples that are installed on the server, I
notice CFML is not actually valid XML. Is that correct?

Was this never the purpose of Macromedia, or do you think it will be in the
future? Valid XML can be a big plus when you want to incorporate a technology
into an XML-based workflow, and I think (for instance) Flex is strictly XML
(mxml = Macromedia XML) and so are ASP.NET and Cocoon, the latter two are rival
frameworks.

Any thoughts on this?

[Stressed_Simon]

As the only thing that will be interpretting the cfml is the CF administrator
this is not really a problem. You can have self closing cfml tags if it makes
you happier!

eg <cfparam name="FORM.Username" default="" />

Just don't do this with custom tags as they will be executed twice.

[Michiel1978]

But you couldn't store CFML pages in an XML database, or parse them, or do
other XML operations on them. This might just be something you'd want to do, if
Coldfusion is part of a larger Framework. An example might be to generate a
different file from the CFML using XSLT.