In Feb 2005, Robert Siemer asked on the 4suite list how to get EntityReader to be aware of entity declarations, such as for character entities like nbsp. -- As it is, entity references (except the ones built in to XML) are treated as if they don't exist.
The discussion got a little bit off track at the time, and nothing was, uh, resolved.
Ideally there would be a way to provide an EntityReader with declarations so that it will be more useful for reading XHTML fragments, for example.