Anyway, are you saying that the Everything Engine should be encoding the special characters into HTML entities before spitting them out as XML?

Precisely. It's not XML unless it's well-formed XML. That's the definition! If something is spitting out bad non-XML, then get them to fix it. The whole point of XML is that if everyone plays by the rules, it's all clean and easy.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker