OK. Who exactly was it that made the & a reserved character in XML? Because I want to beat them round the head with a baseball bat. I feel sure that the CGI standard for URLs came before XML so using the CGI delimiter as a reserved character seems particularly designed to annoy programmers for years to come. And unbelievably stupid!

As an aside I'd like to give exactly the same treatment to the guy at Microsoft who used the backslash as a directory delimiter. What were you thinking? Forwardslash worked fine in Unix and backslash had been an escape character for a decade before. This happened very early in Microsoft's history so it must have been somebody who was/is high up in the organisation.

Any road up. unescaped ampersands are the bane of XML. Especially when it's in user generated data. Closely followed by bad high order characters helpfully generated by Microsoft products when you do cut ad paste. I don't want "smart" quotes! Just give me a plain old quote.

The = is actually OK, this is a cascading error from an unescape prior ampersand. It's an artifact of the fact that one of our user entered fields wasn't being scrubbed. I'm not sure when this will go out, but it should be this week (i.e. before friday) Sorry for the inconvenience.

BTW: when do we get to see and/or hear the gory details on your FOAF-a-licious app?