HTML and CSS Standards

Some special symbols, like the em dash and left and right quotes, are not reliably available in the first 256 characters, i.e., everything from #130 to #159 is not officially defined in the (X)HTML standard. To get those in any character set you need to use their correct numbers as noted below, ten per row, starting with the row number (displayed extra large so you can readily tell what the character is). The correct encoding format is “ ”. Some characters may not be available in every typeface, e.g., this virgule (#8260) isn't in Calisto MT, the default serif typeface for MSIE on Windows 98.

Here, once again, a browser comment is necessary. Not only does the typeface affect presentation of some of these characters, but the browsers display varied characters. MSIE displays the most restricted set (is anyone surprised?). Also, always declare a charset or you can get even more unexpected results (e.g., see the code for this page for one charset declaration; as far as I'm concerned only two should ever be used: “iso-8859-1” for sites restricted to Western European languages and “utf-8” for sites that might use any other language or script—exception: some non-Roman based scripts, e.g., Japanese).

It's also possible to use named entities for some of these characters, as below. “[T]his approach is only available for those characters that HTML 4.01 has specifically chosen to represent as entities.” (W3C) However, some entities are not supported even though the corresponding number displays correctly, once again depending on browser/platform/charset/typeface configuration. These are just some of the character entities.

• – –
• — —
• † †
• < &lt;
• > &gt;
• & &amp;
• • &bull;
• “ &ldquo;
• ” &rdquo;
• ‘ &lsquo;
• ’ &rsquo;
• … &helip;

Because of their special status within (X)HTML, the only secure way to display <, >, and & is with the use of character entities. Though it's still a good idea to use numeric encoding for apostrophe, (once again, browser support for the character entity is inconsistent—yes, it's MSIE).

You can also see a complete list of character entities as defined in the (X)HTML standards.

Sometimes the number encoding will display correctly when the character entity won't, though that generally isn't a problem up to #225 (exception, apostrophe—&#39;).

		 !"#$%&'()*+,-./
		0123456789
		:;<=>?@
		ABCDEFGHIJKLM
		NOPQRSTUVWXYZ
		[\]^_`
		abcdefghijklm
		nopqrstuvwxyz
		{|}~