9: Special Characters
There are lots of special characters that can be used in an HTML document that aren't available directly on the keyboard. Then there are some that are on the keyboard, but have special meaning in HTML (like < and >). To display these characters anyways, you have to type a code: < is < and > is >. Of course, to display that, I had to use the code for &, which is &. Oh, just look at the source to see how convoluted it can get to try and describe what's going on.
Anyhow, the special characters all start with an & and end with a ;. In between, there's a short mnemonic that describes the character: amp for the ampersand, lt for 'less than', gt for 'greater than', nbsp for 'non-breaking space'. The nbsp character is especially useful if you need a space but don't want it to ever make a line break there. For example, if you mention 'Mr. John Q. Public', you probably don't want a line break right after the 'Mr.' so you'd type the name 'Mr. John Q. Public'.
A list off the top of my head of special characters:
| < | < |
| > | > |
| & | & |
| ç | ç |
| é | é |
| è | è |
| å | å |
| ñ | ñ |
| æ | æ |
| à | à |
| á | á |
| ì | ì |
| í | í |
and so on.
By the way, don't worry about memorising these. If you need them, you can go look them up. That's what I do.
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