UTF-8 vs. HTML Entities

With UTF-8 encoded web page HTML Entities are useless?

[jonte]

Greetings all.

While including Korean, Japanese, Russian and Chinese in my web page (and hence changing charset encoding to UTF-8)

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

I noted that the W3C Markup Validation Service (for XHTML 1.0 Strict) stops complaining about transforming characters (such as é, ü, å, etc.) to HTML entities.

I am guessing the validator does it's job, I'm just afraid that some browsers may not show all characters as I intend them to be shown.

What should I do? Stop converting to HTML entities? Convert only "normal" strings to HTML entities? Only use UTF-8 encoding on pages where I truly need it?

Thank you for any thoughts.
Jon

[asquithea]

Personally, when using UTF-8 encoding, I wouldn't bother to use entities to represent printable characters without a good reason. Obviously they can be used independently of the character encoding, but why clutter your source unecessarily?

They do have their uses -- I recently used ​ to get a zero width space, for example -- but you shouldn't need them much these days.

[encyclo]

What should I do? Stop converting to HTML entities?

Absolutely, if your pages are correctly encoded in UTF-8 you should have no need for HTML entities - just use the characters you want directly. This is one of the huge advantages of UTF-8. Browser support is very widespread these days (only IE4/NN4 and below are problematic, and they're ancient).

I use UTF-8 by default in almost all circumstances, even if the pages are in English, and I avoid HTML entities as much as possible.