Mike, 

You are correct, of course.  My confusion lay in that I thought the code
with characters escaped would display the entities and not characters.

Thanks for your help, and clearing up my understanding of this,
Anode

> ... but it is also incorrect. You are somewhat confused about what happens to
> "work" in these lenient tag-soup readers we call HTML user agents, versus what
> is actually correct HTML and XHTML syntax. This is what you really want:
> 
> <form>
> <textarea rows="5" columns="50">
>   &lt;strong&gt;Hello, world!&lt;/strong&gt;
> </textarea>
> </form>
> 


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