Sure that works for some things but

1. You know there are no entity names for most unicode characters? Eg Chinese. You may as well use the numeric entity codes 2. In XML the entity names other than lt gt amp and quot are not defined unless you have a dtd, so you should not use them across an xml api, eg for an Atom feed, or across an xml web service, unless it defines a dtd including them which is unlikely. 3. If you get those errors, it is because you have something set up wrong. Those things are fixable. Fixing them will help you understand whats going on better. As the article says, get out your hex...