Even with the pervasiveness of XHTML, some web developers forget that the XML specification only defines five built-in character entities and most of the converted named entities that TextMate produces actually break some apps that rely on this strict interpretation.
It would be convenient if there was another conversion command that would use the numeric ISO character in place of the named entity. For example, instead of of converting a ' character to ' the proposed command would output ’ ...and – would instead be –
I would assume that TextMate would need to store an updated HTML -> XML lookup table to do this, similar to the old command.