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  • All my documents have been saved and uploaded as UTF-8 since 2013. My question is whether in 2020 it's safe to drop ö when writing HTML and write ö instead? Because - even in a UTF-8 document - I'm still not going to drop delimiter character escapes like &, < and '. Was I drawing a false analogy in thinking that extended-Latin character escapes were like delimiter character escapes? Commented Apr 3, 2020 at 9:50
  • Note: the <meta> tag does not use and does not need a closing slash and never has in HTML. Commented Apr 3, 2020 at 11:07
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    @Rob, there are many of us that believe that all tags should be closed. HTML allows it and XHTML requires it. Closing the tag in the given example was Wikipedia's choice. Commented Apr 3, 2020 at 13:05
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    @Rounin, the only character entities one needs are &amp, &lt;, &gt;, &quot;, and &apos. In fact, these are the only entities that XHTML allows: List of XML and HTML character entity references - Wikipedia Commented Apr 3, 2020 at 13:09
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    If you declared your character set to be ISO-8859-1 in your headers and meta tags, you shouldn't have even needed to use those entities. The problems stem from browsers using a default character set because it wasn't declared. When you don't declare a character set at all, then using any non-ASCII character is problematic and using entities is safer. Commented Apr 3, 2020 at 17:46