Character Entities

As with any syntactic language, HTML has certain characters that have special meaning. The two most obvious of these characters are the < and > symbols, which surround all tags. These characters cannot be typed in directly if the designer's intent is to display these characters. Thus, all characters that can be displayed in a web browser have numeric values assigned to them. In addition, many of these characters have names also assigned. The numeric values are entered into the source web page as &#nnn; where nnn is some 3 digit value. For example, the < symbol is entered as '&#060;'. Name values are entered into the source web page as &name; where name is the name associated with this character. Again, using the < symbol, this would be entered as '&lt;'. The set of characters defined by the World Wide Web Consortium are fully supported in the browser in conformance with the standard.