Character References

Unlike SGML and HTML, XML is not ASCII based.  It is based on Unicode so that it can support multiple languages.  We are going to discuss multi-language support in a short while, but we are first going to discuss other entity references that XML supports.

Since HTML is ASCII based, it is difficult to get true multi-language support.  This being the case, you can enter the code for a foreign language character such as è (&egrave;) and í (&iacute).  These abbreviations are taken from the ISO 8859/1 character set, which is derived from the ISO/IEC 646 version of the ASCII alphabet.  You can also enter a hexadecimal value for any character code.  

This does not take the place of true multi-language support.  This only allows us to use basic character codes so that we can use characters that our keyboard may not support.  In the next section, we are going to discuss how XML takes advantage of Unicode to provide true multi-language support.