Contents The XHTML Language and Design Sourcebook

Supplementary Material --

HTML and XHTML Entity and Character Reference Test Documents

HTML and XHTML let you reference any character using a character reference of the form &#xxxx;, where xxxx is the position of the character in the Unicode character set. Note, however, that ths only works reliably for Internet Explorer 4 (and greater) and Navigator 5 (and greater).

HTML 4.0 and XHTML 1.0 also support several entity references, that let you reference some of these special characters by name. An entity reference looks like &name;, where name is the special entity name. For example, the entity é produces the character é.

Older browsers (Navigator 4, Internet Explorer and earlier) support support the ISO 8859-1 entity references -- the first example explains which of these are not supported by early browsers (e.g., Navigator 2). Newer browsers (Navigator 5, Internet Explorer 5 and later) support all these entites.


© 2000, by Ian S. Graham Last Modified: 5 March 2000