The ASCII character set consists of 256 symbols. The first 128 symbols (low ASCII) correspond to the numbers, letters, and other symbols you can type on your keyboard with or without the shift key down. The second 128 symbols (high ASCII) consists of special characters needed for many of the non-English languages and characters like the copyright symbol.
Type the code below into any text editor and save it with the name "lesson13.html" in your "mySite" folder. You may view the completed lesson in a new window by clicking here . After you create this page, open it in your Web browser.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>XHTML Lesson 13: Special Characters</title>
</head>
<body bgcolor="white">
<h1>Special Characters</h1>
<p>Some common special characters are:</p>
<p>The copyright symbol: ©.</p>
<p>Umlauts on vowels: ä ë ï ö ü</p>
<p>Acute accents on vowels: á é í ó ú</p>
<p>Grave accents on vowels: à è ì ò ù</p>
<p>Registered trademark symbol: ®</p>
</body>
</html>
Special symbols are known as character entities in XHTML. Each character entity begins with the ampersand (&) symbol followed by a code to describe the character and ending with a semicolon (;).