The Tangled Web

Entity Encoding

Let’s talk about character encoding again. As noted on the first pages of this chapter, certain reserved characters are generally unsafe inside text nodes and tag parameter values, and they will often lead to outright syntax errors in XHTML. In order to allow such characters to be used safely (and to allow a convenient way to embed high-bit text), a simple ampersand-prefixed, semicolon-terminated encoding scheme, known as entity encoding, is available to developers.

The most familiar use of this encoding method is the inclusion of certain predefined, named entities. Only a handful of these are specified for XML, but several hundred more are scattered in HTML specifications and supported by all modern browsers. In this approach, ...