And those three ways to encode a title. Do I really imagine that every parser is going to undo the double-encoding correctly? Or XHTML conversion if I use a namespace prefix?
In most environments it’s no harder, and in browsers themselves (which is where half of it is consumed) it’s arguably easier.
When you parse a document or fragment that is in HTML syntax, the DOM representation is of elements in the http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace.
There is no difference.