[Haskell-beginners] Web.Encodings replacement

[João Cristóvão]

Hi,

I have a specific question followed by more general ones...

I would like to use the decodeHtml function from Web.Encodings, but
cabal reports this package as 'deprecated', so my first question is:
is there anything equivalent?

A search in Hayoo returns decodeHtmlEntities from Text.XML, but if I
load it in ghci:

decodeHtmlEntities "abc&aaa"

returns

ContentEntity "abc&aaa"

And not

ContentEntity "abc&aaa" or something like that.

Is there a direct equivalent, or did I found the right replacement,
but I am missing something?

The more general questions are:
1) A 'deprecated' package means, from my understanding, that it is
abandoned or at least not maintained to compile on the latest Haskell
Platform, correct?

2) However, sometimes the package may be deprecated mainly because
there are better implementations in other packages, which I would
assume is the case here. Is there any easy way to check those 'package
evolutions'?

Thanks for your help,
João