Not in HTML. Never has worked that way.
Special reserved characters have always been handled this way because you don’t want to accidentally interpret something the wrong way.
Same for URL encoding. You upload “Clever Name.PDF” to a website and it generates a URL of “Clever%20Name.PDF” because spaces aren’t valid in URLs. %20 is the code for a space.
Text encoding is SUPER basic and anyone looking to get involved in Linux or scripting absolutely should know that stuff FIRST.
Source: I was teaching Linux 23 years ago before it was cool.
Here’s a good primer:
ASCII:
https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/ASCII-American-Standard-Code-for-Information-Interchange
URL encoding:
https://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.ASP
Entity encoding:
https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_entities.asp
Really, ALL of the W3Schools stuff is just fantastic. Anyone remotely interested in this stuff should start at the beginning there and work up.