Head First HTML with CSS

character entities are for special characters
114 Chapter 3
I was just creating a Web
page explaining everything I was
learning from this book, and I wanted
to mention the element inside
my page. Isn’t that going to mess up
the nesting? Do I need to put double
quotes around it or something?
You’re right, that can cause problems.
Because browsers use < and > to begin and end tags, using
them in the content of your HTML can cause problems.
But, HTML gives you an easy way to specify these and other
special characters using a simple abbreviation called a character
entity. Here’s how it works: for any character that is considered
“special” or that you’d like to use in your Web page, but that
may not be a typeable character in your editor (like a copyright
symbol), you just look up the abbreviation and then type it into
your HTML. For example, the > character’s abbreviation is
&gt; and the < character’s is &lt;.
So, say you wanted to type “The element rocks.” in
your page. Using the character entities, you’d type this instead:
The &lt;html&gt; element rocks.
Another important special character you should know about
is the & character. If you’d like to have an & in your HTML
content, use the character entity &amp; instead of the &
character itself.
So what about the copyright symbol? And all those other
symbols and foreign characters? You can look common ones
up at this URL:
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_entities.asp
or, for a more exhaustive list, use this URL:
http://www.unicode.org/charts/