It's one of the many peculiarities of XML: the "less-than" bracket is not allowed in text (because it could indicate the opening of a new XML tag), but the "greater-than" bracket does not need encoding when it's in text, because it's not ambiguous.
Just check what the W3C says about writing a raw >:
For characters such as > where XML defines a built-in entity but does not require its use in all circumstances, it is implementation-dependent whether the character is escaped.
Comments
Increase the terror further by adding Jsonx to the mix: http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SS9H2Y_7.5.0/com....
Isn't one of their examples invalid XML?
http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SS9H2Y_7.5.0/com....
Shouldn't
beIt's one of the many peculiarities of XML: the "less-than" bracket is not allowed in text (because it could indicate the opening of a new XML tag), but the "greater-than" bracket does not need encoding when it's in text, because it's not ambiguous.
I'm pretty sure most XML handling libraries would use > - never seen a raw > used in XML (though possible I might not have noticed).
Edit: Forgot to say thanks for pointing that out!
Just check what the W3C says about writing a raw >:
(https://www.w3.org/TR/xslt-xquery-serialization-31/#serphase...)