Beyond reserved characters, HTML entities cover thousands of symbols: currency (€ €, £ £), math (× ×, ÷ ÷, ° °), and arrows (→ →, ← ←).
With UTF-8 you can usually just paste the real character, but entities are safer when a file's encoding is uncertain or the symbol is awkward to type. Numeric codes (→ for →) cover anything without a name.