National Center for Supercomputing Applications
A Beginner's Guide to HTML

Special Characters

Escape Sequences

Four characters of the ASCII character set -- the left angle bracket (<), the right angle bracket (>), the ampersand (&) and the double quote(") -- have special meaning within HTML and therefore cannot be used "as is'' in text. (The angle brackets are used to indicate the beginning and end of HTML tags, and the ampersand is used to indicate the beginning of an escape sequence.)  

To use one of these characters in an HTML document, you must enter its escape sequence instead:  

&lt; 
   the escape sequence for < 
&gt; 
   the escape sequence for > 
&amp; 
   the escape sequence for & 
&quot; 
   the escape sequence for " 

Additional escape sequences support accented characters. For example: 

&ouml; 
   the escape sequence for a lowercase o with an umlaut: ö 
&ntilde; 
   the escape sequence for a lowercase n with an tilde: ñ 
&Egrave; 
   the escape sequence for an uppercase E with a grave accent: è

A full list of supported characters can be found at CERN. 

NOTE: Unlike the rest of HTML, the escape sequences are case sensitive. You
cannot, for instance, use &LT; instead of &lt;. 

Forced Line Breaks

The <BR> tag forces a line break with no extra space between lines. (By contrast,
most browsers format the <P> paragraph tag with an additional blank line to more
clearly indicate the beginning the new paragraph.) 

One use of <BR> is in formatting addresses: 

    National Center for Supercomputing Applications<BR>
    605 East Springfield Avenue<BR>
    Champaign, Illinois 61820-5518<BR>

Horizontal Rules

The <HR> tag produces a horizontal line the width of the browser window. 

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