Why does MyFaces escape national characters?

[Randahl Fink Isaksen]

According to the JSF1.1 spec section 6.4 the ResponseWriter 
implementation should be "performing
appropriate character encoding and escaping", but I think MyFaces seems 
to have taken this a bit too far. Not only does it escape characters 
which has a special meaning in XML, like the < character, it also 
escapes national characters like the Danish 'ae' character which it 
transforms to its escape equivalent ("&#230;"). This seems to me to be 
completely unnecessary when outputting unicode formatted XML, since 
unicode supports 'ae' and since 'ae' does not have a special meaning in XML.

This turns out to be a problem in my application of MyFaces because I 
would like to output something like this:

<div id="Vandm&#230;rke">

where the "&#230;" should in fact have been the danish letter 'ae'.

Can anyone elaborate on why MyFaces would do this and/or if this 
behavior can be configured to work otherwise?

Thanks

Randahl