All that is why I'm giving the recommendation that I'm giving. :-)

You can work with escaped characters avoid going through Unicode, if you wish; but it is hard to get that really right and most people don't.

That's why I assert that you should not work with the HTML directly and should not work with the XML directly. It's safest to think of HTML and XML not as a data format, but as an opaque serialization of a data structure. You ask one deserializer for the data structure, and get something unambiguous (ie, Unicode) that you can work to your heart's content with; then you give the still unambiguous result to another serializer that produces conforming output for you.

As I said, you can do it differently. Just as you can avoid using strict. It's jut much easier to not shoot yourself in the foot if you stick to that practice.