Why shouldn t apos be used to escape single quotes

Question

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  amp  x27  or  amp  39   should NOT be escaped as  amp apos  except in XHTML documents  when it appears within the attribute value itself    Why shouldn t  amp apos  be used   Also  is  amp quot  safe to be used instead of  amp  34

User · Answer

amp apos  is not part of the HTML 4 standard    amp quot  is  though  so is fine to use

User · Answer

amp quot  is on the official list of valid HTML 4 entities  but  amp apos  is not   From C 16  The Named Character Reference  apos       The named character reference  amp apos     the apostrophe  U 0027  was   introduced in XML 1 0 but does not   appear in HTML  Authors should   therefore use  amp  39  instead of    amp apos  to work as expected in HTML 4   user agents

User · Answer

If you need to write semantically correct mark-up  even in HTML5  you must not use  amp apos  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  amp  39  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     lt p gt  lt q gt He told me to  lt q gt give it a try lt  q gt  lt  q gt   I said  lt p gt   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            lt     gt         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   8217  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

User · Answer

amp quot  is valid in both HTML5 and HTML4    amp apos  is valid in HTML5  but not HTML4  However  most browsers support  amp apos  for HTML4 anyway

User · Answer

If you really need single quotes  apostrophes  you can use  html      numeric   hex  amp lsquo     amp  145      amp  x91     for the left beginning single-quote and  amp rsquo     amp  146      amp  x92     for the right ending single-quote

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