• From: Roger L Costello <costello@m...>
• To: "xml-dev@l..." <xml-dev@l...>
• Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2022 11:25:26 +0000

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="&#x3C;x>blah&#x3C;/x>"/>

And the numeric character references will be replaced during the parsing process to yield this:

<Test foo="<x>blah</x>"/>

Correct?

/Roger

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Why is < illegal in an attribute value but theequivalent hex and decimal character entities are legal?
    • From: Pete Cordell <pete++xmldev@c...>