In CakePHP 1.1 if you need to display an image or piece of HTML with a link to an action, you need to instruct cake NOT to escape the contents of the "Title" attribute with the last false statement like this:
e(
$html->link(
$html->image("add.gif"),
array('action' => 'add'),
array(),
null,
false ));
In CakePHP 1.2 you could rewrite this to:
e(
$html->link(
$html->image("add.gif"),
array('action' => 'add'),
array('escape' => false)));