' (quote) or \ (backslash) -- Which is the escape character?

[Vanguard]

When writing up expressions, I used something like:

\.html

which should match on ".html" (so the period character is treated as a period instead of a special character used to mean "1 of any character at this position"). I think this is what the author told me to use.

However, according to http://www.newsbin.com/nb33help/regexp.htm, the quote character is the escape character, so my expression would be:

'.html

That just doesn't look right. Are both the quote and backslash used to denote "next character is a non-special character". Or is the backslash supposed to mean this and the quote actually does something else? Or is one deprecated and the other is the recommended mechanism?

[Smite]

Well, it might have worked that way in v3.3, but I think someone just screwed up the doc. It's the \ character in 4.x

[Quade]

I typically use [.]html. Meaning the literal character ".".