In XML, you don&#x27;t <i>need</i> to escape &gt;, IIRC. So, it would seem some programmer is either lazy here, or trying to save bytes. You MUST escape &lt;, as otherwise it looks like the start of a tag. Note that the content of the tag you see that in is serialized HTML, too, so at that point, there&#x27;s HTML in the XML. (and not very good HTML…)