recent Error: reference to non-SGML character occurrence

From: Stan Hutchings (Stan.Hutchings@lmco.com)
Date: Fri, Sep 21 2001

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    Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2001 20:54:55 -0400 (EDT)
    From: Stan Hutchings <Stan.Hutchings@lmco.com>
    To: www-validator@w3.org
    Message-id: <3BABE148.98137B25@lmco.com>
    Subject: recent Error: reference to non-SGML character occurrence
    
    Just recently, my pages fail to validate <!doctype html public
    "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> with an "Error: reference to
    non-SGML character" for code such as &#151; (m-dash) &#133; (ellipses)
    etc. and the message "Sorry, this document does not validate as HTML
    4.01 Transitional." 
    I can't find any links to further information. The numeric codes
    previously validated (<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
    content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> and <meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
    content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"> both fail to validate, perhaps
    I must use a different character set definition?). 
    Is there a cure/work-around, or do I have to give up numeric character
    entity references? I can't find many Character entity references for
    these characters. The one source
    (http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/sgml/entities.html)
    implies &mdash; or &#8212; can be used instead of &#151;, but I wonder
    how older browsers will handle this. And there is no mention of
    ellipses.
    Any advice would be appreciated.
    Stan Hutchings