Can I avoid escaping the text in html?
You can avoid escaping your text, by avoiding special characters like < > &, but we strongly recommend that you don't.You must however, set the correct encoding on your web page, we recommend adding a meta tag in the <head> section of your html page, and to use UTF-8 as your encoding.
Example of UTF-8 meta tag:
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
.....
</head>
There are however, a few problems in the non escaping approach.
People can change their setting, for which character set to use, when displaying the web page.
You still have to write < > & manually, escaped, to prevent your page from messing up.
Your html editor can mess up special characters, if you open a utf-8 encoded document in an editor, sometimes it will be saved as standard iso-8859-1.
All these problems are avoided by using escaped characters.