Dan, I think you owe me an apology. The remark above is below you.
Your proposal will make it impossible to use numeric character
references without facing the risk of them having different meanings
in different browsers, and you do not offer a single set of entities
that cover most of the characters in use around the world today, so
you also do not offer an alternative. That is incompatibility at the
the most fundamental level of all: the character level.