As stated in, When did single quotes in HTML become so popular? and Jquery embedded quote in attribute, the Wikipedia entry on HTML says the following:
The single-quote character ('), when used to quote an attribute value, must also be escaped as
'
or'
(should NOT be escaped as'
except in XHTML documents) when it appears within the attribute value itself.
Why shouldn't '
be used? Also, is "
safe to be used instead of "
?
'
is not part of the HTML 4 standard.
"
is, though, so is fine to use.
If you really need single quotes, apostrophes, you can use
html | numeric | hex
‘ | ‘ | ‘ // for the left/beginning single-quote and
’ | ’ | ’ // for the right/ending single-quote
If you need to write semantically correct mark-up, even in HTML5, you must not use '
to escape single quotes. Although, I can imagine you actually meant apostrophe rather then single quote.
single quotes and apostrophes are not the same, semantically, although they might look the same.
Here's one apostrophe.
Use '
to insert it if you need HTML4 support. (edited)
In British English, single quotes are used like this:
"He told me to 'give it a try'", I said.
Quotes come in pairs. You can use:
<p><q>He told me to <q>give it a try</q></q>, I said.<p>
to have nested quotes in a semantically correct way, deferring the substitution of the actual characters to the rendering engine. This substitution can then be affected by CSS rules, like:
q {
quotes: '"' '"' '<' '>';
}
An old but seemingly still relevant article about semantically correct mark-up: The Trouble With EM ’n EN (and Other Shady Characters).
(edited) This used to be:
Use ’ to insert it if you need HTML4 support.
But, as @James_pic pointed out, that is not the straight single quote, but the "Single curved quote, right".
Source: Stackoverflow.com