...that does not interfere with UNC pathnames.

I am continually battling against inconsistent behaviour where
machine.name appears inline on some pages and on other pages it pushes machine.name to another line without rendering the double backslash.

Would it be possible to replace the special-ness of the double backslash sequence with something like a \n or a {break} macro so that the double backslash sequence has no special meaning? It would be acceptable if I had to put a quadruple backslash to get a double backslash sequence. Perhaps this behaviour could be configurable in the administration options?