Anyone looking for local-first smart bulbs, plugs, etc with Tasmota or ESPHome I can thoroughly recommend https://www.mylocalbytes.com/ - not affiliated in any way, just a very happy customer.
> 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 " & " and " < " respectively. The right angle bracket (>) may be represented using the string " > ", and MUST, for compatibility, be escaped using either " > " or a character reference when it appears in the string " ]]> " in content, when that string is not marking the end of a CDATA section.
> In the content of elements, character data is any string of characters which does not contain the start-delimiter of any markup and does not include the CDATA-section-close delimiter, " ]]> ". In a CDATA section, character data is any string of characters not including the CDATA-section-close delimiter, " ]]> ".
> To allow attribute values to contain both single and double quotes, the apostrophe or single-quote character (') may be represented as " ' ", and the double-quote character (") as " " ".