I\'m using an \'&
\' symbol with HTML5 and UTF-8 in my site\'s
. Google shows the ampersand fine on its SERPs, as do all the browse
It depends on the likelihood of a semicolon ending up near your &
, causing it to display something quite different.
For example, when dealing with input from users (say, if you include the user-provided subject of a forum post in your title tags), you never know where they might be putting random semicolons, and it might randomly display strange entities. So always escape in that situation.
For your own static html, sure, you could skip it, but it's so trivial to include proper escaping, that there's no good reason to avoid it.