The Basics of HTML

Special Characters

• If you noticed, in many of the web pages used in this tutorial, we write out tags such as <B>.
• You may ask yourself, how does the web browser know that I want to display the bold tag itself and not make the text next to it bold?
• Well, the answer is that the web browser does not know. I have to tell it.
• Specifically, I use the &#60; to represent the < sign and &#62; sign to represent > sign.
• Consider the following code:
  
  &#60;B&&#62;This text is not going to be bold, but is going to display as the tag itself.&&#60;B&&#62;
  
  

  <P> <B>This text is bold however</B>

• When displayed on the web, it would look like this:
  
  <B>This text is not going to be bold, but is going to display as the tag itself.</B>

  This text is bold however
  
  Some of the special characters have a numeric value as well as a character value. For example, the less than sign can be written either at &lt; or &#60;

• There are many such special characters that must be defined with such syntax because there is no way for the web browser to recognize them otherwise.
• The following table goes over the list of special characters.