Jon, sorry, but I have to correct you. In HTML the & codes are two-byte-unicodes, so they go up to 65536 - though not all of the possible codes have a character defined.
And then there is also the problem that not every font has every character defined - most fonts only have latin characters.
But think of all the chinese, japanese, thai, sanskrit, cyrillic, greek... characters (apart from our latin characters).
MudGuard