Text Characters
 
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What is it?
Attributes
Tag Example
Parent/Content Model
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Browser Peculiarities
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What is it?
A text character usually lives as an Octet, which is a single byte or 8 bits of data. Using 8 bits allows for 256 possible distinct character codes (a range from 0-255.) While the HTTP protocol that is used to transport web documents allows the full 256 character range of the ISO 8859-1 characters to be transmitted (allowing support of many western languages), not all operating systems or applications may natively support this range.

In order to increase portability/viewability of the entire character set, HTML offers alternative representations of all the ISO 8859-1 characters using coded entity representations. These codes are created using characters from the proper subset of the ISO-8859-1 character set known as ASCII (in all ISO 8859 languages ASCII is the character range 0-127.) A special syntax is used to represent these Character Entities using either a number value or a shorthand mnemonic word. Character entities can address the entire ISO 8859-1 character range, but the printing characters that make up the ASCII character set (032-126) usually do not need to be encoded. It is this subset that makes up the 'TEXT' grouping that this page is named for.
Printable ASCII
Character Set Positions

032-064 | 065-096 | 097-126

Reserved HTML Characters
While most all computers and browsers should recognize ASCII, a few common characters in this range are reserved for use in the HTML language. These exceptions [see chart below] will need to be encoded as character entities if they are to be displayed in an HTML document. The use of the Entity Name is encouraged over the Entity Number in these special cases.
Character Name ISO 8859-1
position
Entity
Number
Entity
Name
HTML
result

Quotation Mark
Ampersand
Less Than Symbol
Greater Than Symbol
34
38
60
62
"
&
<
>
"
&
<
>
"
&
<
>

Attributes
Text characters do not accept any attributes
Example
Hi there, this is normal text. Testing - 1, 2, 3.
Parent Model
Pending
Content Model
Text does not accept any tag content.
Tips & Tricks Browser Peculiarities
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