HTML Entities

HTML Entities

Some characters are reserved in HTML.
It is not possible to use the less than (<) or greater than (>) signs in your text, because the browser will mix them with tags.
To actually display reserved characters, we must use character entities in the HTML source code.
A character entity looks like this:

&entity_name; OR &#entity_number;

To display a less than sign we must write: &lt; or &#60;
Tip:
The advantage of using an entity name, instead of a number, is that the name is easier to remember. However, the disadvantage is that browsers may not support all entity names (the support for entity numbers is very good).

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Non-breaking Space

A common character entity used in HTML is the non-breaking space (&nbsp;).
Browsers will always truncate spaces in HTML pages. If you write 10 spaces in your text, the browser will remove 9 of them, before displaying the page. To add spaces to your text, you can use the &nbsp; character entity.