need XSL to output a literal <, not &lt;

[Leeoniya]

i use SimpleXML in php to set a targID attribute of an XML tag to <!contacts_data+>. In the XML it gets converted to &lt;!contacts_data+&gt;

i am using an XSLT to output HTML, not XML, and using a parser on the frontend to search for the <!contacts_data+> delimiter in the AJAX responseText.

how do i make the XSL output literal > and < to the browser source?

if anyone can help me out, i'd appreciate it,
Leon

[Leeoniya]

adding disable-output-escaping="yes" to value-of did the trick : )

hope this helps others.