No escaping with html()->a() and other methods

[decadence]

Today I discovered that elements you create with html() helper are not properly escaped.

For example documentation says that second argument is text:

function a($href = null, $text = null)

But if you look at source code you see that method calls html method on A:

public function a($href = null, $contents = null)
{
        return A::create()
            ->attributeIf($href, 'href', $href)
            ->html($contents);
}

Therefore user may thinks (as I thought) that text he passes will be escaped but it will not and this can lead to bad things.
Is this by design? My thought that everything should be escaped by default. And if you want html you can call html method by hand.
No warning in documentation is found.