HOW TO BUILD A PROFESSIONAL WEB SITE     Rel. 1.1

about special characters

There are five very important special characters :

So the HTML standard makes allowance for entering many different characters, including the so called ASCII characters, within your text, through special encoding of each character entity.
There are two codes allowed for special characters in the HTML language:

• The one you have just seen, starting with the & sign, followed by the special character abbreviated name, and ending with a semicolon (Named Entity).
• Or a similar sequence, comprising the & sign, the # (hash, or pound or sharp) sign, the character's position number in the ASCII Table of Characters (instead of the abbreviated name), also ending with a semicolon (Numerical Entity).
• NB: Special Characters should always be lower case.

In both the above coding methods, the & of a Special Character simply tells the Browser we are inserting a SPECIAL CHARACTER in the textual content - the semicolon means we are ending a SPECIAL CHARACTER - whatever is in between is a code that, hopefully, all Browsers will understand.
Hopefully because, in spite of all Standards, the behaviour of the various available Browsers in their various versions is not always predictable - besides, special characters may or may not be displayed depending on user's platform (computer, operating system, etc.) and user's selected font for display.

TIP
Here is another way of making multiple blank lines using the NON BREAKING SPACE Special Character:
<BR>&nbsp;<BR>
A sequence of these notations will create multiple blank lines (but do some experiments yourself).

A comprehensive List of all CHARACTER Entities is here.