Using HTML Entities

You can use HTML entities in place of special characters that will not display properly when typed natively in HTML. The primary examples of these characters are the less-than (<) and greater-than (>) signs, also known as the left and right angle brackets that make up HTML tags.

For these tags to be displayed, you must type the entity names for them: &lt; and &gt; respectively. So, if you want the following text to be displayed on your blog (literally):

 <a href="http://www.somedomain.com">Link here!</a> 

you would have to type the following the in the post editor:

 <a href="http://www.somedomain.com">Link here!</a> 

Special characters are not the only instances in which HTML entities are used. Accented characters from languages other than English often provide instances in which HTML entities are necessary. Suppose that you're creating a blog post containing a recipe and one of the steps in the recipe is to sauté something. Sauté contains an accented character: é. The corresponding HTML entity for this character is &eacute; and therefore the word would be typed as follows in the post editor:

 sauté 

WEB RESOURCE

http://www.bbsinc.com/iso8859.html

Here you can find links to numerous resources regarding HTML entities.