In that same dutch team (team GoT, 1295) there are some guys that use an & in their name, this has to be converted to & because all XML parser won’t be able to parse the XML: it’s not well formed!
[quote=frickY]Special characters should be encapsulated within CDATA-containers.
Escaping characters with an HTML entity inside XML has no sense.[/quote]
The use of & > and < are valid within XML (all other “HTML entities” are not) so when you only have one of these characters it is better to use these entities than encapsulating them in a CDATA. Ofcourse when you use CDATA the problem of the high characters could also fixed, but even there it is better to use the right charset.