Unicode Explained

such references tends to be rather technical in nature. The formal information

might even confuse the reader.

A combination of some of the above

This is usually the best strategy. The methods used will vary by the audience and

by the character. An explanation such as “Cyrillic capital letter ya (in Unicode:

U+042F)” might work reasonably well.

Sometimes you need to avoid common phrases in order to be unambiguous. It is com-

mon to say “double slash” in English, when you mean two consecutive slash charac-

ters, //. However, such wording is potentially ambiguous, since Unicode contains the

double solidus operator // (U+2AFD) as a separate, independent character. Unicode

contains hundreds of characters with the word “double” in their name. Thus, a wording

like “two slashes” is safer. Since even this might be misunderstood as referring to one

character, the expression “two slash characters” is even safer.

HTML, SGML, and XML Notations for Characters

HTML is the markup language in which web pages are usually written. It is formally

a special case of SGML or XML, which are generic markup languages. These languages

have special notations that you can use for writing characters, if it is for some reason

difficult or impossible to use the characters themselves.

Character and entity references in web authoring

If you use a “Save as HTML” or “Save as Web page” command or something similar

in a word processor, ...