Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In SGML, HTML and XML documents, the logical constructs known as character data and attribute values consist of sequences of characters, in which each character can manifest directly (representing itself), or can be represented by a series of characters called a character reference, of which there are two types: a numeric character reference and a character entity reference.
For example, "λ" can also be encoded as λ in an HTML document. The character entity references <, >, " and & are predefined in HTML and SGML, because <, >, " and & are already used to delimit markup. This notably did not include XML's ' (') entity prior to HTML5. For a list of all named HTML character entity ...
For example, a literal < normally indicates the start of a tag, and & normally indicates the start of a character entity reference or numeric character reference; writing it as & or & or & allows & to be included in the content of an element or in the value of an attribute.
These special sequences are character references. Character references that are based on the referenced character's UCS or Unicode code point are called numeric character references. In HTML 4 and in all versions of XHTML and XML, the code point can be expressed either as a decimal (base 10) number or as a hexadecimal (base 16) number. The ...
The format is the same as for any entity reference: &name; where name is the case-sensitive name of the entity. The semicolon is required. Because numbers are harder for humans to remember than names, character entity references are most often written by humans, while numeric character references are most often produced by computer programs. [1]
Web pages authored using HyperText Markup Language may contain multilingual text represented with the Unicode universal character set.Key to the relationship between Unicode and HTML is the relationship between the "document character set", which defines the set of characters that may be present in an HTML document and assigns numbers to them, and the "external character encoding", or "charset ...
The entity declaration assigns it a value that is retained throughout the document. A common use is to have a name more recognizable than a numeric character reference for an unfamiliar character. [5] Entities help to improve legibility of an XML text. In general, there are two types: internal and external.
Although any character can be referenced using a numeric character reference, a character entity reference allows characters to be referenced by name instead of code point. For example, HTML 4 has 252 built-in character entities that do not need to be explicitly declared, while XML has five.