Character Entities
Character entities use abbreviations or words
instead of numbers to represent characters that may be easier to
remember than numbers. In this sense, entities are merely a convenience.
Character entities must be predefined in the DTD of a markup language to
be available for use. For example, the copyright symbol may be referred
to as ©
, because that entity
has been declared in the DTD. The character entities defined in HTML
4.01 and XHTML are listed in Appendix
C (a list of the most common is also provided in Chapter 10). XML defines five character
entities for use with all XML languages:
-
<
Less than (<)
-
>
Greater than (>)
-
&
Ampersand (&)
-
'
Apostrophe (')
-
"
Quotation mark (“)
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