and my understanding is that
   certain kinds of character data cannot be stored in attribute values,
   since they are CDATA not PCDATA. Am I mistaken about this?)

Yes you are mistaken. All character data that is allowed in element
content is allowed in attributes (although newlines are normalised
differently: to #10 in element content and #20 (usually) in attributes.
What doesn't happen is that the string is _Parsed_ looking for element
start tags, etc. Of course you have to quote " if using " to surround
teh value, but that is the only difference.

David


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