Character Entity References

reference  | 27 June 2006 | 

Over at A List Apart, one of the most delectable and beautifully presented websites for webdesigners, Peter Sheerin has a now legendary article titled “The Trouble With EM ’n EN (and Other Shady Characters)” on typography, typographical styles and character entity references. It’s a pity his advice isn’t followed more often throughout the Web. There’s little doubt that it makes for much easier on-screen reading. Apart from anything else, following his advice renders pages that are much more courteous to the reader.

One of the references in that article is to the W3C page on Character Entity References in HTML 4. There is a detailed table there of all character entity references with their HTML codes and CData numeric codes. Unfortunately, the table is difficult to decipher. I’ve taken that table and re-formatted it for easier reading. Presenting the W3C-based table of Character Entity References…

Notes:

1. For HTML Entities, use ampersand & and semicolon ; before and after the given code. Thus, nbsp should be written  
2. For numeric data, precede the code with ampersand & and hash/pound #, and follow it with a semi-colon ; Example: ù

I hope you find this useful!