Character Entities
As with any syntactic language, HTML has certain characters that have special meaning. The two most obvious 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 a Web browser can display are assigned numeric values. In addition, many of these characters also are assigned names. 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 '<'. 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 '<'. The browser fully supports the set of characters defined by the World Wide Web Consortium, in conformance with the standard.
