Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Character Entities

Character entities use abbreviations or words instead of numbers to represent characters that may be easier to remember than numbers. In this sense, entities are merely a convenience. Character entities must be predefined in the DTD of a markup language to be available for use. For example, the copyright symbol may be referred to as ©, because that entity has been declared in the DTD. The character entities defined in HTML 4.01 and XHTML are listed in Appendix C (a list of the most common is also provided in Chapter 10). XML defines five character entities for use with all XML languages:

<

Less than (<)

>

Greater than (>)

&

Ampersand (&)

'

Apostrophe (')

"

Quotation mark (“)