XMLData opaqueness ?

Folks,

   With respect to passing in content inside the XMLData element (on either
a Verify or Sign) do you believe it would be legitimate to ensure opaqueness
of the content by escaping all the <'s and >'s ?

   For example replace all < with &lt; and all > with &gt; 

   See attached for an explicit example.

   In fact my XML library (Gnome libxml2) is doing exactly this when I
invoke the serialize() method on the parsed xml tree object.

   This in fact allows an implementation to support an xml declaration line
(i.e. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> ) which might be inside the
content (and whose encoding may be different from the request's e.g.
ISO-8859-1 or UTF-16) without causing parsing problems.

   Is anyone else having similar challenges ?

   Browsers accept this escaped nesting.

Ed