Of course not, it's either embedded in a CDATA section or the characters are escaped to the relevant entities: http://www.w3.org/TR/xml/#syntax

> The ampersand character (&) and the left angle bracket (<) must not appear in their literal form, except when used as markup delimiters, or within a comment, a processing instruction, or a CDATA section. If they are needed elsewhere, they must be escaped using either numeric character references or the strings " &amp; " and " &lt; " respectively. The right angle bracket (>) may be represented using the string " &gt; ", and must, for compatibility, be escaped using either " &gt; " or a character reference when it appears in the string " ]]> " in content, when that string is not marking the end of a CDATA section.

They'd probably escape out the angle brackets with entities. Sorry, Bobby Tables.

Probably, well hopefully, sure. But I want to know whether they did, and whether the technique is fragile.

I don't really understand why you are being down voted for a technical question. It seems like answering it without giving a downvote as a snarky "ISN'T IT OBVIOUS?" would be sufficient.