HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
4.9. Special Character Encoding
For the most part, characters within documents that are not part of a tag
are rendered as is by the browser. However, some characters have spe-
cial meaning and are not directly rendered, and other characters can't be
typed into the source document from a conventional keyboard. Special
characters need either a special name or a numeric character encoding
for inclusion in a document.
4.9.1. Special Characters
As has become obvious in the discussion and examples leading up to
this section, three characters in source documents have very special
meaning: the less-than sign (
<
), the greater-than sign (
>
), and the am-
persand (
&
). These characters delimit tags and special character referen-
ces. They'll confuse a browser if left dangling alone or with improper tag
syntax, so you have to go out of your way to include their actual, literal
characters in your documents.
[*]
[*]
The only exception is that these characters may appear literally within the
<listing>
and
<xmp>
tags, but this is a moot point because the tags are obsolete.
Similarly, you have to use special encoding to include double quotation
mark characters within a quoted string, or when you want to include a
special character that doesn't appear on your keyboard but is part of the
ISO Latin-1 character set that most browsers implement and support.
4.9.2. Inserting Special Characters
To include a special character in your document, enclose either its stand-
ard entity name or a pound sign (
#
) and its numeric position in the Lat-
semicolon, without any spaces in between. Whew. That's a long explan-
ation for what is really a simple thing to do, as the following examples
illustrate. The first example shows how to include a greater-than sign in a
