HTML Best Practices: Should I use ’ or the special keyboard shortcut?

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.

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