Can I use HTML entities to represent special characters?
Yes, but XStandard will convert them to characters or to Numeric Character References (NCR). For example, the entity € representing the € symbol is equivalent to the NCR €.
It is not encouraged to use HTML entities, because they are an old fashioned way to escape characters. Entities unnecessarily complicate the maintenance of your markup and they make it more difficult for markup to be processed by XML technologies like DOM parsers and XSLT.
For content management systems that don't fully support Unicode (UTF-8 or UTF-16) such as ASP and PHP, the following setting will escape characters above the 255 value to their appropriate NCRs:
<param name="EscapeUnicode" value="yes" />
There is no need to escape characters below the 255 character range if you serve your content with the correct encoding. For example, the characters ñ À Ç É Ò à á â ç è é ê ô ö ù û £ do not need to be escaped when served with ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 encoding.
Note
When you switch from XStandard's WYSIWYG mode to View Source mode, NCRs are converted to characters for easy reading.