[NTG-context] :: in xml?

Salvete, trying to typeset an unchanged old file with a more recent ConTeXt version, I keep running into problems. I have reduced the first of these (others may or may not be symptoms of the same, I'll see that later) to this input: \starttext \startXML <a>a::b</a> \stopXML \stoptext It seems the xml parser does something special with colons in the content of elements. I don't think it should and this is probably just a left-over from looking for xml namespaces, but that is just a guess. Regards, Christopher