just in case it’s ever useful to anyone else: if you use blogger to write an xml weblog then anything like "" will mysteriously change to “[CDATA[$stuff$]]” when you try to edit the template. it may take you a very long time to figure out what the hell happened.

the reason i was messing with my xml template at all was because i was test driving various pieces of weblog/cms software to find something that suits my needs better than blogger (which is mostly simple but effective but then screws your life up by not understanding the concept that an edit command ought to bring back exactly what the save command saved no matter what it thinks of it). i hate them all. back to plan b.