Beyond Borders: Web Globalization Strategies

NAMES AND NUMERIC ENTITIES

Character entities can be represented as named entities or numeric entities. For example, to display the copyright symbol on a web page, you can enter © or #169;. The ampersand instructs the browser that a named entity is being used, and the number sign indicates that a numeric entity is being used. The named system is more user friendly but quite limited because there are only a limited number of named entities from which to choose. The numeric system, although hardly user friendly, is virtually unlimited because all characters are represented by numeric code points. For instance, using the Unicode character set, you could represent all 91,000 characters using nothing but numeric entities. Tables ...