UTF-8, still using HTML entities in navigation markup output?

[mvlcek]

Ive checked this out, and I fail to see where the problem is. From the source, you may see the encoded characters, but why is this a bad thing?
...

Code:

German ÄäÖöÜü

It makes a lot of operations on the page a bit more difficult, e.g.

• Extracting the words for search - you have to decode the entities first
  
• Extracting the first n characters for an excerpt - the number of characters will be off, if you don't decode
  
• Splitting a long page into multiple pages.
  

Together with these terrible slashes I had to get the content for I18N Search like (it works, but it is correct?):

Code:

$content = html_entity_decode(strip_tags(stripslashes(htmlspecialchars_decode($pagedata->content))), ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8')

I think, it's impossible to get the page content with tags, but everything besides htmlspecialchars decoded - thus the pagify plugin doesn't care.

BTW: I hope the person responsible for add/stripslashes and it's "automagical" usage is never allowed to define a functionality of a programming language again ;-)