I care what validators say or imply. The reason I started using UTF-8 in the first place, was because it is a W3C accessibility guideline to use UTF-8 over the more common (in that time) iso-8859-1.
If you want to create accessible websites, one of the first requirements is validated code.
If we ignore validators and the W3C, who is there to officially tell us what we _should_ do?
We are long past the point, sure, so much so, that W3C recommends it too.
And about browser support: If you want to guarantee that most browsers understand and support your code, your best bet is to adhere to the W3C that wrote the standard.
If you want to create accessible websites, one of the first requirements is validated code.
If we ignore validators and the W3C, who is there to officially tell us what we _should_ do?
We are long past the point, sure, so much so, that W3C recommends it too.
And about browser support: If you want to guarantee that most browsers understand and support your code, your best bet is to adhere to the W3C that wrote the standard.