jQuery Grid Plugin - jqGrid

Hi, couple of questions:

1) My grid is loading text and html from a db. Some of the cells that contain html data, when loaded into the grid, have the forward slash removed (e.g. <br/> becomes <br> when loaded into grid). This only occurs for elements that don't have a closing tag. Is there any way to prevent this?

2) Can I prevent the html data in a cell from being display as rendered html and instead leave the literal html?

thanks!