O.. M.. F.. G.. I had no idea they did this. I mean, what is the point? Talk about "not invented here" mentality: "I've got a fantastic idea! Unicode already has an official name for every Unicode character, so let's throw all of that out and come up with our own names that have no relation to what those Unicode guys did! And while we're at it, HTML4, HTML5? Version numbers are for pu$$7$s, so lets drop that too, and then randomly throw in a few hundred extra character entities every two to eighteen months for a fresh 'What's new' bullet point!"

It's for backwards compatibility, like most of the HTML5 spec. If browsers suddenly start becoming HTML5-compliant and as a result most of the web stops working, then they've failed.

I agree with the reasoning. But damn, it makes things suck going forwards. This is why we can't have nice things. :-(