> Point being: having identifiers not being escapable makes 
> sense to me. I have always found it a bit unfortunate that 
> more and more languages allow higher characters (above the 
> US-ASCII range) to be used in identifiers, including XML, 

Yes, I agree it's a mixed blessing. I can imagine that if you're in Greece,
mixing one vocabulary that uses Latin letters with another that uses Greek
letters could make tags like <A> just a bit confusing.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/