Re:&#147 not "safe" (Score 1)

I use smart quotes in my HTML by using the “ and ” marks. It comes out fine...

That's not any better. If your document is set to be "ISO-8859-1", then those are control characters, not quotes. If your document is "Windows-1252", then those are smart quotes, and you don't need to escape the values anyway.

No, they won't be then, either. Character entity references are independent of the character set used to write an HTML page. According to the HTML4 specification, they always refer to the Document Character Set, which is UNICODE. Therefore, “ always refers to a control character and is definitely not a curly quote.