Why do ampersands (&) need to be encoded in JSF? Is there a way around this?

Question

I often have Javascript on my JSF XHTML pages that has && in it, which I end up having to encode as &&

For example, when I place

Answer 1

It's because & is special characters in XML : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_and_HTML_character_entity_references