title: Escaping of angle brackets in manifest
body: <p>I want to understand why some extensions use escaping for <code>&lt;all_urls&gt;</code> angle brackets, whereas another extensions don't.</p>
  
  <p>Some manifests don't use escaping at all, some use escaping for opening angle bracket, and some for both. Examples:</p>
  
  <pre><code>"permissions": [
      "&lt;all_urls&gt;"
  ]
  
  "permissions": [
      "\u003Call_urls&gt;"
  ]
  
  and even
  
  "permissions": [
      "\u003Call\u005Furls\u003E"
  ]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What's the purpose behind these replacements and should / should not I escape it?</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p>Update. As live examples, here are few extensions offered by Google, which are using escaping: <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/share-to-classroom/adokjfanaflbkibffcbhihgihpgijcei" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Share to Classroom</a>, <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-dictionary-by-goog/mgijmajocgfcbeboacabfgobmjgjcoja" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Google Dictionary</a> and <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/high-contrast/djcfdncoelnlbldjfhinnjlhdjlikmph" rel="nofollow noreferrer">High Contrast</a>. There are probably more. These 3 is just a result of my own brief research.</p>
  
  <p>Also, here is assumption that escaping is for validation (<a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16096482/what-does-http-https-and-all-urls-mean-in-the-context-of-ch">link</a>):</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>Although the manifest.json should be Unicode-encoded, I've seen a lot of extensions escaping the <code>&lt;</code>, <code>_</code> and <code>&gt;</code>, to their's equivalent Unicode-format of <code>"\u003Call\u005Furls\u003E"</code>. I've asked around, and apparently some developers have used validation mechanism, which then validated the JSON "invalid" because of those characters.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>But, Google extensions which I gave as live examples, escapes only opening angle bracket, that is:</p>
  
  <pre><code>\u003Call_urls&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>That's why, from my point of view, the quote above doesn't actually answer the question.</p>