Forum Moderators: open
but I have seen entities in search engine result snippets, which tells me the info they grab from the description tag is literal
Er... I don't understand what you mean. Do you mean that if I use “ then the search engine will display “ and not " as intended?
Do you mean that if I use “ then the search engine will display “ and not " as intended?
I'm not entirely convinced... I too have seen a lot of html entities in search engine results, but as far as I can tell they are always by design (?!) - although often unintentionally I think! Looking at the source of the page, you can see that, apart from the obvious mistake of missing off the final ';' - the '&' is often incorrectly encoded as '&' (possibly by the users page editor?), so the resulting source in the page is something like '“' which results in '“' being output in the description/title or wherever. (?)
One thing I have noticed, however, is where the html entity is all capitals (!) in the page source, like '&' - this does seem to appear in G as the literal '&', despite browsers rendering this as '&' (this contrasts with the lowercase '&' which would appear as '&' in G as expected).
But, like rocknbil and tedster, I would still avoid using html entities within these attributes (ie. stick with single quotes) if at all possible. They are, afterall, purely for information and using markup that requires interpretation cannot help.
