'<' character in href

 Hi, in my XSL, I need to have an href link and I need to pass down the
parameters that get read from XML...., but it complains " The value of
attribute "href" must not contain the '<' character."
 How would I escape that character? Thanks

<a
href="xmlReport?contentType=excel&amp;reportType=cab&amp;sort_selection=<xsl
:value-of select="SELECTED_SORT"">


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