£ converted into £,   conv erted into ~

I'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature I don't know how to use
properly - perhaps someone can help me here?

If I type £ to put a pound sign into a document in source view (I
use horizontal split), then make any change in the upper window
(rendered view), then as soon as I save the document Amaya changes my
£ to an actual £ sign character. Unfortunately the £ sign displays
as 'unknown character' (a question mark in a black diamond shape) in
Iceweasel and Konqueror (on my Debian Etch system running Amaya 10 - Feb
29 2008)

The same behaviour happens with   which gets converted into (as far
as I can tell) an actual space, though it is displayed in source view as
a tilde (~).

Is Amaya supposed to do this (is the &escape; syntax now deprecated -
I'm a bit out of touch with current HTML standards) in which case how
should I get pound signs and non-breaking spaces that render properly on
a web browser?

-- 
John Stumbles                                       http://yaph.org.uk
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