HTML: Symbols (Entities)

There are certain situations where we need to be able to add a special characters or symbols to our web pages. These could be for different forms of currency, copyright or trademarks, even mathematical symbols.

Consider this:

6 < 10

22 > 12

What do you think the browser makes of those brackets? Any chance it might think you have a tag like <1022> ? It is possible. But if you view the source code you won't see those brackets there. Instead you will see a special code being used. It would look like this:

6 < 10

22 > 12

This code is referred to as ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) and allows for the support of characters within a computing system. It allows us to access many more characters beyond what is readily (or obviously) available on the QWERTY keyboard.

Here is a chart indicating some of the more common ones:

There are many more at w3schools!