It performs as advertised, but doesn't escape any of the HTML characters, so typing </textarea> in the textarea will break it. It appears that the HTML plugin can fix this, but I don't have that installed (yet).

Looks like TT2 do need "escaping expressions" feature that exists in HTML::Mason for so long: you can add one or several escape flags at the end of expression to be expanded. <% $text_that_should_be_escaped |h%> will do exactly what you want - escape all special HTML-entities. Morover, you can customize default escape flags to avoid writing them everywhere or to change behaviour of existing components.

-- brother ab