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Tuesday, July 19th

Curing HTML headaches  - or

Convenient list of Ampersand characters

category: software

As the writer and proofreader of copy for more than one media format, I often get my symbols and shortcuts confused. HTML special characters seem particularly hard for me to remember. For those of you who are newer to HTML, many special characters in HTML are referred to as Ampersand characters. The code for the characters begins with an ampersand, & , and ends with a semi-colon. Between the ampersand and the semi-colon is either an entity name, usually some abbreviation of the character name, or an entity number. Entity numbers are allegedly easier for browsers to interpret, but it's tough for the code writer to remember scads of three digit numbers.

Dreamweaver and Frontpage contain drop-down menus of these characters. In Dreamweaver, use Insert-Special Characters to find the menu. In Frontpage, use Insert-Symbol to use the special character menu. Both Dreamweaver and Frontpage offer a limited number of characters in their drop-downs. If you need an unusual character, search the internet with the term HTML entities, and you'll find many sites with long lists of alphabetic and numeric entities.

Entry Author

She said on 07.19.05 @ 03:03 PM CST


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