>You asked about setting the output encoding to "ascii".  This doesn't
	>seem to make any difference.

	That's too bad. In general, finding an output method (like "ascii" or 
	"US-ASCII" or whatever your processor supports) that doesn't include 
	upper-ASCII characters is a good way to compel the serializer to escape all 
	non-ASCII characters as Unicode character references.


The problem isn't that the characters aren't escaped, but that they are escaped using the URI scheme (%HH), instead of the XML scheme (&#DDDD;).

I'm not familiar with the help tool that you are using, but it seems like it should handle the un-escaping of it's parameter since that is the correct way to represent strings in an href attribute...

In Netscape 7 and IE5.5 there is encodeURI, and decodeURI JavaScript functions for handling uri encoded strings:

<a href="javascript:alert(decodeURI('{label}'));">foo</a>

Although, in reality I would be using the onclick attribute, and the issue would be moot...

Josh