Question

What’s your opinion on encoding accented and special characters in XHTML and XML.

• Do you convert each and every non-US-ASCII character to named entity?
• You use ISO-8859-x or Win-125x and encode to entities anything else?
• Or do you directly write everything in UTF-8, without bothering about entities?

Please elaborate on which and why.

Answer 1

I can’t tell you exactly why this happens, but in my 5 year experience of using UTF-8 for every web page (I mostly use cyrillic and baltic symbols), I haven’t yet seen any character displayed incorrectly.