Q: What is the difference between named and numeric entities?

Named entities such as © are easier to read; numeric ones such as © (decimal) or © (hex) work for every Unicode character. With UTF-8 pages you rarely need either except for the few special characters above.

Question 1

Which characters must be escaped in HTML?

Accepted Answer

Inside text, escape & as & and < as <. Inside attribute values, also escape the quote you used: " or '. Escaping > as > is optional but common. Failing to escape user input is the root cause of cross-site scripting (XSS).

Question 2

What is the difference between named and numeric entities?

Accepted Answer

Named entities such as &copy; are easier to read; numeric ones such as &#169; (decimal) or &#xA9; (hex) work for every Unicode character. With UTF-8 pages you rarely need either except for the few special characters above.

Question 3

What is  ?

Accepted Answer

A non-breaking space (U+00A0). It looks like a space but prevents a line break between the words on either side, for example “10 km”.

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