Main Index |
Top Of Tree |
Tag Index |
Tag History
- 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.
- 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
Boring Copyright Stuff...