Hmmm....I misread what you said... But your reference to the "Unicode characters in <code> blocks (browser)" shows this has been an issue for 10 years and nothing has been done. If trying experiments and backing them out is your idea of "scary", perhaps that's why no one does anything. FWIW, I have feelings about not wanting to change stuff that works and am sometimes not wanting to deal with the stuff that might break if I change something -- but I realize that if I don't try, nothing will ever get done -- I have to be willing to mess things up and *fix them*, in order to learn, grow and move forward. Certainly I mess up often, but I usually am forced to eat my own doo doo, so I have to fix things.

I don't run a website, but do build lots of my own tools (but not close to a majority). I do build my own kernel customize for my hw. And I try to build various tools in my tool chain (including perl). If I mess things up too badly on my server, I'm offline as its my web-gate (email host, DNS, web-proxy) ... and at times I get "really: 'I so don't want to be doing this on a weekend at 3am in the morning---waaaa!'".

As far as browser encoding html enties, the comment was unclear about which directly was meant. I wasn't aware my browser was mangling my output before it got to you (which is what you seem to be saying).

It sounds like, what you are saying is that we need a way to denote to PM that some characters that are in html-entity form, we want to be re-encoded into chars (vs. those who explicitly want to include raw-html-text-entities in their code examples). How many people do that -- I realize it might be part of someone asking about some HTML module in perl, but for the most part how common is that?

Maybe it would be acceptable to not translate HTML related entities for those chars needed in HTML syntax (like greater+less than, ampersand... etc), but do translate those that are >0x7f (as they aren't used as being part of HTML syntax).