escaping tags

Dear all,

The following xsl is invalid:

<xsl:if test="aTest">
 <TABLE>
</xsl:if>

But what if I WANTED to open the tag here without closing it?  Is there a 
way to escape the "<" and the ">"?  I know you can use "&lt;"/"&gt;" but 
these remain as "&lt;" / "&gt;" in the HTML.
I want to write HTML tags in a tamplate but WITHOUT closing them exactly 
where I open them (I want to close them at a grater level of recursion)
Is this even possible?

Thanks,

Mr Andrew Maclean

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