Should I still use html entities? Why?

Question

Are HTML entities still useful or should I simply create UTF-8 encoded html documents? Please explain why.

Answer 1

If the encoding is set correctly (and the document is saved as UTF-8) you should be able to work with just the characters. From the W3C:

Using an encoding such as UTF-8 means that you can avoid the need for most escapes and just work with characters.

http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-escapes

However, you still need to use entities for special characters such at greater/less than.