HTML escape sequences and content-before

I wanted to use use a stylesheet to add an &mdash before certain content on a web page. This should be easy with modern CSS, but span.foo:before{ content: '— '} places the text — on the web page as if the CSS engine ran the string through a sanitizer and is giving me — instead.

A Stack Overflow discussion says I need to know the character's Unicode value and use that instead. This is stupid.

Useful reference: numeric values of all named HTML escape sequences.

RemoveHandler .pl .cgi

My website will have a directory where I do not want CGIs to run. The obvious and wrong answer is to create an .htaccess file with "Options -ExecCGI", but that causes the errors "Access forbidden!" and "Options ExecCGI is off" when I try to access a .pl file. For the next obvious and wrong solution, I tried renaming the file to ".pl.txt". That did not work.

Given that I would like to serve .pl files as plain text, I tried "AddType text/plain .pl". RemoveType also does not work; note that the docs say that this is what you use for this case. RewriteRule \.pl$ - [T=text/plain] did not work; note, again, the docs say it should.

What did work was to add "RemoveHandler .pl".