HTML The Definitive Guide (43 page)

With the respective "on" attribute and value, you may react to that event by displaying a user dialog
box or activating some multimedia event. Section 13.3.3 in
Chapter 13

4.8 Block Quotes

4.10 Special Character

Encoding

Chapter 4

Text Basics

4.10 Special Character Encoding

For the most part, characters within HTML documents that are not part of a tag are rendered as is by the browser. However, some characters have special meaning and are not directly rendered, while other characters can't be typed into the source document from a conventional keyboard. Special characters need either a special name or a numeric character encoding for inclusion in an HTML

document.

4.10.1 Special HTML Characters

As has become obvious in the discussion and examples leading up to this section of the book, three characters in HTML source documents have very special meaning: the less-than sign (<), the greater-than sign (>), and the ampersand (&). These characters delimit tags and special character references. They'll confuse a browser if left dangling alone or with improper tag syntax. So you've got to go out of your way to include their actual, literal characters in your HTML documents.[
5
]

[5] The only exception is that these characters may appear literally within the