RSS setup (encoding/smartquotes problem)

RSS setup (encoding/smartquotes problem)

[Johnny]

I am trying to set up a few rss feeds in gnus but am seriously
struggling to comprehend how to get the display right. I have set up a
few rss feeds and some are displaying unfriendly octal codes while
displaying the same rss in Firefox shows apostrophes, quotes, linebreaks
and dashes. The encodeing is set to utf-8, and I have tried redisplaying
using other encoding by C-u W-q (e.g. windows-1252).

I suspect this may have to do with smartquotes? Or is it dependent on
the gnus-article-wash-function (currently nil and mm-text-html-renderer
set to 'lynx')? 

Apostrophes, quotes and dashes are misrepresented by a sequence of
characters, whereas linebreaks (i.e. between paragraphs) are represented
by two codes.

I also tried to view the source (C-u g) and wash html (W h) in an
attempt to get wiser, alas to no avail! However, this led me to suspect
maybe mm-text-html-renderer needs to be set to something else?

For example I get
| Firefox     | Gnus                             | C-u g, W h |
|-------------+----------------------------------+------------|
| '           | \303\242\342\202\254\342\204\242 | =E2=80=99  |
| "           | \303\242\342\202\254\305\223     | =E2=80=9C  |
| -           | \303\242\342\202\254\342\200\234 | =E2=80=93  |
| (linebreak) | \303\302                         | =C2=A0     |
|-------------+----------------------------------+------------|

Any advise on this would be greatly appreciated!

Less important, but maybe related is that (embedded) links seem dead in
the articles, could this also be related to the above, and how to
remedy? (The [1], [2], ... are visible but cannot be followed)

Thanks!


-- 
Johnny