It is valid for text/html (aka tagsoup). If you serve the document as application/xhtml+xml, then the browser should ignore named entities except the 5 ones (quot, amp, lt, gt and apos).
That is not exactly correct. If in a document served as application/xhtml+xml the entities are defined correctly by the DTD pointed to by the DOCTYPE or in its internal subset, then they are perfectly usable, unless of course in the former case if you are dealing with a processor that does not fetch external entities.
If the above made little or no sense to you, congratulations, you have not wasted time figuring out useless technology :) Yet another reason to forget about the whole mess with entities and just use UTF-8.
-- Robin Berjon Research Scientist Expway, http://expway.com/
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