Creating the Pages
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Special Characters
One of the problems in any sort of textual work on computers is that different types of computer and different operating systems use different character sets. If HTML is designed to work on any computer, how does it get round this problem?
It does so by restricting its basic character set to numbers, letters, and a few punctuation marks, and having a special way of indicating all other characters. Each character (including all the normal ones) has a number, and the character can be entered into a Web page by typing the number between an ampersand and a semi-colon. For example the £ sign is represented as £ and the "less than" sign <(which starts all tags, and so can't be used as a text character in its own right) is <.
But because this is not easy to remember, many frequently used special characters can also be referred to by a memorable name or abbreviation, £ and < being used for £ and <.
This also includes foreign characters such as:
- é (é or é) or
- ö (ö or ö).
The ampersand itself is & or &.
If you are using an HTML-aware word-processor or a Web authoring package you will not need to worry about this, as the software should take care of it automatically. Many HTML editors provide easy ways of entering these characters. Otherwise you will need to look them up.