All parts of this HTML guide for Everything 2 include:
(all chapters) |
Overview/Contents/Index |
Tags and Starting New Lines |
Character Formatting |
Special Characters |
Lists |
Giving Credit Where Credit is Due |
Miscellaneous Tags |
EOF: Index and Information |
Tables |
(Quick Start)
3: Special Characters
3.1: Special Normal Characters
If you've been experimenting with drugs, I mean, HTML, you may have been having trouble displaying things like a less-than sign, < .
There is a simple reason for, and solution to, that problem.
The reason: < and > are reserved for denoting a tag (that should be obvious enough by now) and & starts a character entity reference.
What is that, you ask?
Well, just read on for an answer...
These character entities allow numerous symbols to be inserted into normally ASCII-only HTML files.
Always use these entities instead of just typing them:
- & to show & (ampersand)
- < to show < (less than)
- > to show > (greater than)
You may find useful when spacing is important.
For example, I started this paragraph with " " to give the first line a slight indentation.
I also stuck in several non-breaking spaces in the above unordered list to align the elements better.
3.2: Using square brackets in Everything
A specific "problem" with Everything is the inability to insert the square brackets, [ and ], without forming a link.
The best way that I've found to deal with this by using
- [ to show [ (left/opening square bracket)
- ] to show ] (right/closing square bracket) (this generally isn't needed, but makes runaway links easier to spot, and provides balance with the required way to escape in open square bracket)
3.3: Math symbols
There are many other cool symbols you can include using character entities, like
² ³ (superscript 2 (²) and 3 (³)),
α × β ÷ γ ∫ δ ‾ ◊ ‰ € ∇
, but not all browsers support all these characters, so you may want to just stick with & < > [ ] .
Of course, if you're feeling adventurous, a full list of character entities allowed in HTML 4 is available from the W3C at
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html
and in the writeup HTML symbol reference.
previous: Chapter 2: Character Formatting | next: Chapter 4: Lists