Indeed it does make use of escape characters (ka-chow!). The problem is how to deal with them going in (how do you ensure that everything going in is properly "escaped"), and how to deal with them properly coming out (do I print "\$" when I output to HTML, or do I print "$?").

There are utility functions that escape the characters correctly. It's going back through the idkfa codebase and ensure that everything that was escaped is then unescaped upon being outputted to the web browser.