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Text Characters End Tag: NA Support Key: 2 \| 3 \| 3.2 \| 4 \| IE1 \| M1 \| N1 \| O2.1	What is it? Attributes Tag Example	Parent/Content Model Tips & Tricks Browser Peculiarities
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What is it?

A text character usually lives as an Octet, which is a single byte or 8 bits of data. Using 8 bits allows for 256 possible distinct character codes (a range from 0-255.) While the HTTP protocol that is used to transport web documents allows the full 256 character range of the ISO 8859-1 characters to be transmitted (allowing support of many western languages), not all operating systems or applications may natively support this range.

In order to increase portability/viewability of the entire character set, HTML offers alternative versions of all the ISO 8859-1 characters using coded entity representations. These codes are created using characters from the proper subset of the ISO-8859-1 character set known as ASCII (in all ISO 8859 languages ASCII is the character range 0-127.) A special syntax is used to represent these Character Entities using either a number value or a shorthand mnemonic word. Character entities can address the entire ISO 8859-1 character range, but the printable characters that make up the ASCII character set (032-126) usually do not need to be encoded. It is this subset that makes up the 'TEXT' grouping that this page is named for.

Printable ASCII Character Set Positions
	032-064 \| 065-096 \| 097-126

Reserved HTML Characters

While most all computers and browsers should recognize ASCII, a few common characters in this range are reserved for use in the HTML language. These exceptions [see chart below] will need to be encoded as character entities if they are to be displayed in an HTML document. The use of the Entity Name is encouraged over the Entity Number in these special cases.

Character Name	ISO 8859-1 position	Entity Number	Entity Name	HTML result

Quotation Mark Ampersand Less Than Symbol Greater Than Symbol	34 38 60 62	" & < >	" & < >	" & < >

Attributes: Text characters do not accept any attributes

Example: Hi there, this is normal text. Testing - 1, 2, 3.

Parent Model: %In-line Parent% | %Block Parent% | <Del> | <Ins> | <Legend> | <Option> | <Script> | <Style> | <Textarea> | <Title>
Content Model: Text does not accept any content.

Tips & Tricks

DTD Note: The " named character entity was retracted from the HTML 3.2 DTD. There is still some confusion as to WHY this was done, as this entity is in wide use, and exists in the HTML 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0 DTDs. There are two differing stories as to why it was deleted from the 3.2 DTD:
1. Dan Connolly (co-author of HTML 2.0) has said the omission was a mistake.
2. Dave Raggett (author of HTML 3.0, 3.2 and 4.0) has said that the omission was intentional due to a disagreement in the HTML ERB over which entities should be in HTML 3.2. Only the basic set of entities was agreed upon. (Many thanks to a reader who sent me some mail clarifying this.)
Any documents using " will generate validation errors under the HTML 3.2 DTD, but it should be safe to leave these entities in legacy documents due to wide legacy and future browser/DTD support. The alternate form of this entity ('"') WILL validate and should be considered when authoring new documents.

Browser Peculiarities

Nothing to Report

Text Characters