Re: misleading? comments in xml REC text on <

I believe that the phrase in section 4.4.2 ("except that ... is always
treated as data") should have been removed when the definitions of the
predefined entities were changed to use double quoting.  This change
was made right at the end of the drafting of the spec, and it was
probably just an oversight that this phrase was left in; Michael
Sperberg-McQueen had previously said[1]:

  Such a declaration would enable the spec to drop all of the statements
  which imply that amp, lt, gt, etc. are special.

I therefore believe that the correct resolution of PE19 it to remove
the phrase from section 4.4.2, and leave the entity definitions as
they are.

The last paragraph of [1] may shed some light on the "No < in
attribute values" WFC.

-- Richard

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-xml-sig/1997Nov/0346.html