Re: [xml-dev] Why is < illegal in an attribute value but the equivalent hex and decimal character entities are legal?
In response to my question: 1. Why is it that < is illegal but the equivalent hex and decimal character entities are legal? Liam Quin answered: Because numeric character references are always treated as data when they are read, not markup. Ah!!!!!!!!!! So this is perfectly well-formed XML: <Test foo="<x>blah</x>"/> And the numeric character references will be replaced during the parsing process to yield this: <Test foo="<x>blah</x>"/> Correct? /Roger