I\'m using Java 6. I have this dependency in my pom ...
xerces
By definition:
A comment starts and ends with "--", and does not contain any occurrence of "--".
So no, your XHTML is not well-formed because you can't use -- anywhere inside a comment. Can you replace it by something else? or maybe put a space in-between, like this: - -. There really isn't a clean solution to this problem, any alternatives involve messing around with placeholders, encodings, etc.