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 example given is definitely wrong, in theory as well as in practice, in HTML5 and in HTML 4. For example, the HTML5 discussions of q markup says: “Quotation punctuation (such as quotation marks) that is quoting the contents of the element must not appear immediately before, after, or inside q elements; they will be inserted into the rendering by the user agent.”

That is, use either ´q’ markup or punctuation marks, not both. The latter is better on all practical accounts.

Regarding the issue of characters vs. entity references, the former are preferable for readability, but then you need to know how to save the data as UTF-8 and declare the encoding properly. It’s not rocket science, and usually better. But if your authoring environment is UTF-8 hostile, you need not be ashamed of using entity references.