*Unnecessary* instances of HTML escape sequences like λ ?

[Chris Seberino]

I understand the need for web pages to denote the 5 HTML special
characters >, &, <, ', and " with alternate representations like
&#34;.....

(These 5 are the *only* special characters in HTML right?)

What I don't understand is why an HTML page encoded with UTF-8 would
use this &#...; format for other *NON* special characters as well. It
is unnecessary for anything else right?

(By the way, this reason this came up is I pasted some text from
OpenOffice into a Django form that was pushed to a WordPress site. I
noticed a zillion of these &#...; all over the place. Most seemed
unnecessary since UTF-8 is already powerful enough to handle all types
of chars with addition of special treatment for &, <, >, ' and ". I'm
not sure what part of the process added these HTML entities OpenOffice
-> Django -> WordPress)

Thanks!

Chris