CData's "ad-hoc escaping" by closing and reopening a CData section always felt to me as if it could be a compatibility hazard - I think most examples of CData s

CData's "ad-hoc escaping" by closing and reopening a CData section always felt to me as if it could be a compatibility hazard - I think most examples of CData sections have a single section spanning the whole text node - so I wouldn't be surprised if some homegrown parsers didn't handle "edge cases" like multiple sections inside a text node correctly. But I'd want to see evidence that this is actually the case. The OP seems to argue "don't use CData, because the escape sequence for ]]> looks confusing" - and that's just vibes, not a proper argument. If it's for "looks" I think CData would actually be the much better choice. ]]> appears extremely rarely in RSS content while <>& are guaranteed to appear if your content is HTML. So in 99.99%, you won't need any escaping at all for CData and can just insert the HTML verbatim, while "regular" escaping will change every single angle bracket of your HTML.