HTML Character Reference
Original: Stephanos Piperoglou
Revised: Lee Underwood
This is created as a reference source for Web developer and designers. If the terms UCS, ISO Latin 1, character encoding and named character reference mean nothing to you, first please be calm, as they're only barely English.
The characters listed here are split into three groups: The first group lists all the first 256 characters in UCS (the ISO Latin 1 characters). The second and third tables list the rest of the named enties defined in HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0, with the second table listing symbols, mathematical symbols and Greek letters and the third table listing markup-significant and internationalization characters.
- The ISO Latin 1 Character Set
- Symbols, Mathematical Symbols and Greek Letters
- Markup-significant and internationalization characters
The internationalization of the Web is moving at a slow pace down a bumpy road, and using the characters described in the three tables of this reference is not always straightforward. The first thing you need to make sure is that your authoring tool (text editor or HTML-writing application) understands what character encodings are and doesn't just use whatever the operating system uses. Using the first 128 characters (the US-ASCII character set) is pretty simple, and these can simply be entered from the keyboard, but after 127 things get weird. It's best to always know what encoding your authoring tool and Web server are using and let user agents know this explicitly using HTTP headers and HTML META elements, to avoid mix-ups. Even then, browser bugs abound, and nothing will beat extensive testing and listening to your reader's feedback.
For a gentle and practical introduction to HTML and characters, you should check out our own tutorial, which explains UCS and Unicode, character sets and character encodings, and numerical character references and character entity references.
One of the best treatises on HTML and character sets is contained in chapter 39 of HTML Unleashed, published by Sams.net. This chapter was written by WebReference.com author Dmitry Kirsanov, and is available online.
The entities described here are defined in the HTML 4.01 specification as well as the XHTML 1.0 specification if you feel like sorting through DTDs. For more information on ISO standards and Unicode, visit ISO and the Unicode Consortium.
