I just uploaded HTML-Parser-3.39_90 to CPAN. It is supposed to have proper handling of Unicode on perl-5.8 or better. The compile time option to select decoding of Unicode entities is gone.
This release also make <title>...</title> parse in literal mode. If there are many pages out there with non-terminated title elements this might not be such a good idea, so this change might not stay. Please try it out to see if you find problems with it. Regards, Gisle