Validation question: character encoding and "quotes"

Should I bother with it?

[kiril]

For what it's worth, I tried validating a few pages on a site I just created. The first thing I found was that the validator didn't know what "character encoding" to use. Once I specified the "Latin" character set iso-8859-1, the validator didn't like my use of quotation marks and apostrophes inside paragraphs, apparently preferring such things as &quot

My question is this:

Should I even bother to specify a character encoding, and if I do, should I use the alternatives to " and '?

A related broader question is whether I should be concerned about making my pages validate at all? (At the very least, I plan to use the validator to find my blatant html mistakes)

Thanks

[victor]

If you are absolutely confident that yove have only basic ascii characters in your pages (not using accented characters etc), you can probably get away with not having a character encoding. But if you do start adding accented and other extended characters be aware that, without guidance, browsers may interpret them differently to what you expected.

More info at:

[w3.org...]

If you want your pages to display properly in all known browsers, and to be indexed by all known search engines, then it is better to have fully validated code.

If your code is not fully validated, then ensure that you have only inserted errors that are guaranteed not to affect browsers and SE indexers. Anything else is winging it.

As far as I know, there is no completely documented list of the errors you can get away with, so you may need to do a lot of research to be completely confident.

Other thread on topic:
[webmasterworld.com...]