XML Attributes with newline are not handled consistently

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See the two instances I have below (taken from REPL)

Native XML handling, preserves the newline character.

scala> <foo key="val
     | ue" />
res0: scala.xml.Elem = 
<foo key="val
ue"/>

XML.loadString, however, converts to a newline.

scala> XML.loadString("""<foo key="val
     | ue" />""")
res3: scala.xml.Elem = <foo key="val ue"/>

As such, the XML blocks are not equal.

scala> res0 equals res3
res6: Boolean = false

Newlines NOT inside of attributes are preserved in both instances are are equal as such.

scala> <foo>
     | bar
     | baz
     | </foo>
res4: scala.xml.Elem = 
<foo>
bar
baz
</foo>

scala> XML.loadString("""<foo>
     | bar
     | baz
     | </foo>""")
res5: scala.xml.Elem = 
<foo>
bar
baz
</foo>

scala> res4 equals res5
res7: Boolean = true

[scabug]

Imported From: https://issues.scala-lang.org/browse/SI-7395?orig=1
Reporter: Joshua Backfield (jbackfield)
Affected Versions: 2.10.0

[scabug]

Joshua Backfield (jbackfield) said:
No idea why this is set to a blocker, I was unable to change the initial priority.

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@rklaehn said:
I have to disagree with the categorization of this issue as "Minor". Not properly escaping attributes means that scala.xml does not comply to the xml spec. This should be very easy to fix, but to work around this issue is a major pain in the ass.

So why not just fix this? I know scala.xml is on the way to deprecation. But a lot of people are still using it. Especially given that there is no official replacement, and it is still shown in the examples in all the books such as "Programming in Scala".

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@SethTisue said:
The scala-xml library is now community-maintained. Issues with it are now tracked at https://github.com/scala/scala-xml/issues instead of here in the Scala JIRA.

Interested community members: if you consider this issue significant, feel free to open a new issue for it on GitHub, with links in both directions.