The use of character entities in HTML

[diagramatics]

Occured to me when inspecting @KuraFire's PR (#57) for translation. Should we use character entities to replace special characters (apart from < and >) or because of the <meta charset="UTF-8"> we can just paste it in place instead to save character bytes?

[KuraFire]

Saving character bytes on entities is generally a waste of time/energy. However, I'm personally* generally in favor of using actual UTF-8 characters over entities, because that's kind of the point of using UTF-8 in the first place.

* Not particularly backed up by research into what would be a best practice here. 
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On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 9:44 PM, Steven Sinatra notifications@github.com
wrote:

Occured to me when inspecting @KuraFire's PR (#57) for translation. Should we use character entities to replace special characters (apart from < and >) or because of the <meta charset="UTF-8"> we can just paste it in place instead to save character bytes?

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#61

[scheinercc]

@diagramatics - There are the rules from the Google HTML/CSS Style Guide which I personally consider as quite general:

There is no need to use entity references like —, ”, or ☺, assuming the same encoding (UTF-8) is used for files and editors as well as among teams.

The only exceptions apply to characters with special meaning in HTML (like < and &) as well as control or “invisible” characters (like no-break spaces).

Source: http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/htmlcssguide.xml#Entity_References

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