Doing it this way means you have to be marginally more careful about your tools -- specifically, both your text editor and your publishing platform have to able to handle your text in the UTF-8 character set.
For example, if you're publishing on the web and your text is stored in a MySQL database, you'd want to be sure it's using UTF-8.
You also need to be sure your text editor is saving your source text in UTF-8. Many editors have an option for forcing this. Others use UTF-8 natively (i.e., behind the scenes) but don't do a good job of documenting it anywhere.