HTML5: which is better - using a character entity vs using a character directly?

Question

I\'ve recently noticed a lot of high profile sites using characters directly in their source, eg:

“Hi there”

Rather than:

Answer 1

The main advantage I can see with encoding characters is that they'll look right, even if the page is interpreted as ASCII.

For example, if your page is just a raw HTML file, the default settings on some servers would be to serve it as text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 (the default in HTTP 1.1). Even if you set the meta tag for content-type, the HTTP header has higher priority.

Whether this matters depends on how likely the page is to be served by a misconfigured server.