A site I'm working on is switching from ISO. If the HTML character set is set to UTF-8, do I still need to replace ©, é, …, etc with the appropriate HTML entity?
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Dirk Diggler
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possible duplicate of [When Should One Use HTML Entities](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/436615/when-should-one-use-html-entities) – lulalala Jan 17 '14 at 01:30
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No, symbols like ©, é, …, the German umlauts ä, ö, ü, ß and all the other stuff can be used just like any other character when using UTF-8.
But note that some things still have to be entities because they have a special meaning in HTML ( < and > for example, which should still be replaced with > and < if you want to use them in your text)
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1Thanks. What about HTML emails? I assume I don't have the same control over character encoding there as I do on my own site, so should I use entities just to be safe? – Dirk Diggler Sep 13 '11 at 16:15
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2you can give a header to define a charset in an html-mail, too - but some (mostly older) mail-clients will ignore that. best way is, like you said, to use entities in html-mails just to be safe. – oezi Sep 13 '11 at 16:17
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in short : No you don't, actually I would even advise not to use them anymore. A possible legacy usage would be in some html pages links and forms "gets", but even here usually we can deal without.
Flavien Volken
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Depends also on how you generate / edit your content. If you have users editing files locally on Windows and what not, it may be safer to stick to entities after all.
tripleee
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