[O] special characters for HTML

[michael holzer]

hello,

i guess there's a simple way to do this, but i couldn't figure it out,
so i have to ask here:
i want to write german umlauts in files that are exported to html. i
know that you can write for example \auml, but when i'm using this in a
word (e.g. l\aumlstig) this fails. if i put a space behind \auml i get
the umlaut, but obviously i don't want the space there...
so how is this supposed to be done?

thanks for any help,
michael