What is the difference between this & and this & for &(ampersand)? What should be use with utf8 ?
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/01/31/qanda.html
According to O'Reilly you should be using & in xml. UTF-8 is quite a bit different. http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/0026/index.htm
Both are character references and refer to the same character (AMPERSAND, U+0026). & is a named or entity character reference and & is a numerical character reference.
In fact, & is actually just a substitution for & (see list of character entities):
<!ENTITY amp CDATA "&" -- ampersand, U+0026 ISOnum -->
No difference. Utf-8 doesn't matter because & is reserved anyway. So use &
If you both save your file in UTF-8 and even specify it for strict browsers:
<head><meta charset="utf-8">
I would guess that you can also just use the & character. All new browsers will support it and UTF-8.