HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition

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 special 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.

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 ampersand (&). These characters delimit tags and special character references. 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.^[*]

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.

Inserting Special Characters

To include a special character in your document, enclose either its standard entity name or a pound sign (#) and its numeric position in the Latin-1 standard character set^[*] inside a leading ampersand and an ending semicolon, without any spaces in between. Whew. That's a long explanation for what is really ...