January 2010
Intermediate to advanced
791 pages
14h 17m
English
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Chapter 14. Special Characters
IN THIS CHAPTER
Understanding Character Encodings
Special Characters
En and Em Spaces and Dashes
Copyright and Trademark Symbols
Currency Symbols
"Real" Quotation Marks
Arrows
Accented Characters
Greek and Mathematical Characters
Other Useful Entities
As its roots are firmly grounded in plain text, HTML needs to be able to display a wide range of characters—many that cannot be typed on a regular keyboard. Language is rich with extended and accented characters, and there are many reserved characters in HTML.
The HTML specification defines many entities—specific codes—to insert special characters. This chapter introduces you to the concept of entities and lists the various entities available for use.
Note
The W3C website is a good source of information about entities. The HTML entities are listed at www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html.
Understanding Character Encodings
Character encoding at its simplest is the method that maps binary data to its proper character equivalents. For example, in a standard American English document character, 65 is matched to a capital A.
Most English fonts follow the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) coding. So when Web designers insert a capital A, they can be assured that users will see the appropriate "A" in their user agent.
There are, of course, plenty of caveats to that statement. The document must be encoded as English, the specified font must also be encoded as English, the font must be an alphanumeric ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.