Best practice question, regarding escaped entitiy decl

Let's say I have an XSLT stylesheet which needs, under certain
circumstances, to output the British Pound symbol. It is represented in HTML
as £. However, in order to make the XSL parser play nice with it, I am
forced to use something like this:

£

Which seems a bit kludgy. If this is the acceptable method, it's fine- but I
wondered if it's considered a better way to go than outputting the Unicode
£ (had to go and dig up this one at the unicode web site). My
preference is to use the Unicode character directly, but I'm wondering if
that leads to its own problems.

Comments? Thanks,

Corey Snow

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