What does <![CDATA[]]> in XML mean?

Question

I often find this strange CDATA tag in XML files:

I have observed that this CD

Answer 1

From Wikipedia:

[In] an XML document or external parsed entity, a CDATA section is a section of element content that is marked for the parser to interpret as only character data, not markup.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDATA

Thus: text inside CDATA is seen by the parser but only as characters not as XML nodes.