Actually, the "standard" symbols are taken from a couple of code pages - more information here

The idea is that it is up to the renderer to decide what the character should look like. That information is contained in the HTTP headers which are sent before the HTML data - you won't see them if you "view" the HTML text, but you can get hold of them through the COM interface.

If you are simply converting the characters from the "&nnn;" format you should leave them as whatever appears by using the CHR() function, otherwise you are translating to a completely different character.

If you are writing a rendering application then you can change the characters to whatever you want, but you need to be aware that if you ignore the code set which the webserver is expecting you to have installed you may end up with odd results.