HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
Traditional HTML Entities
Table A-2 lists the standard entities found in even the oldest versions of HTML and their
intended renderings. This is the base set of characters supported by ASCII character sets,
and future extensions for full ISO-8859-1 follow. In traditional HTML pages, authors may
use this encoding, which may be specified in the HTTP header:
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Or more commonly, it will appear in a
<meta>
tag like so:
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
However, Web page authors are always encouraged to use the UTF-8 encoding set
either by header,
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
or by tag,
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
unless they have some overriding reason not to.
Recognizing the move toward Unicode, we provide those values as well in all tables.
However, given the vast range of the possible characters we only present those Unicode
entities that are explicitly named in the (X)HTML specifications circa late 2009. For more
information on Unicode, see the section entitled “Embracing Unicode” later in the
appendix.
C
AUTION
Entity values from 127 to 159 are not assigned. Web page authors are advised not to use
them. Interestingly, some of these renderings are common, though they may work for only certain
operating system font combinations. Table A-2 puts these values in italics to emphasize they
should be avoided.
N
OTE
The trademark character (™) may have concerns across browsers and operating system
combinations, particularly archaic ones. Web page authors concerned with perfect backward
compatibility might want to consider using a workaround such as
<sup><small>
TM
</small></sup>
for this symbol.
