I don’t think that one is better than the other in general; it depends on how you intend to use it.
- If you want to store it in a DB column that has a charset/collation that does not support the right single quote character, you may run into storing it as the multi-byte character instead of 7-bit ASCII (
’). - If you are displaying it on an html element that specifies a charset that does not support it, it may not display in either case.
- If many developers are going to be editing/viewing this file with editors/keyboards that do not support properly typing or displaying the character, you may want to use the entity
- If you need to convert the file between various character encodings or formats, you may want to use the entity
- If your HTML code may escape entities improperly, you may want to use the character.
In general I would lean more towards using the character because as you point out it is easier to read and type.