Hacker News Reader

UTF8 is the best way to edit html pages. Almost no need of entities.

But why people don't always use UTF8? Or when it makes sense not using it?

For one, it can be annoying to type with a conventional keyboard and editor: remembering and typing ← or γ is easy (and most entities have mnemonic names).

Why only almost?

You still need entities for reserved characters like & and <

That's right. Totally forgot about those.

Google indeed recommends not using entity references in their HTML/CSS Style Guide. [0]

[0] http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/htmlcssgui...

Yeah! Nice one. I've been avoiding entities and it's way cleaner and visual to look back at the codes.

This is really useful, thanks for sharing.

Have you actually manually mapped the similar characters for the entire unicode set? It would be cool to have some offline image processing done that identifies related characters to augment what you already have.

Fantastic, I needed something like this just the other day. Might be worth looking at implementing something similar as an editor plugin.

HTML Entity Character Lookup