HTML Special Symbols

The standard ASCII set contains 128 characters and can be used perfectly well for English documents. However, accents, curly quotes, and many commonly used symbols unfortunately cannot be found in this group. Luckily, HTML can contain any character in the full ISO Latin-1 character set (also known as ISO 8859-1). IN windows and Unix systems, just enter the character in the usual way and it will display properly in the browser.

Watch out! Even though you can type special characters, accents and o on in your Macintosh and DOS based PC, these systems do not use the standard ISO Latin-1 character set for the characters numbered 129-255 and will not display them correctly in the Web page, you must enter these special characters with either name or number codes.

Symbols are case sensitive and more descriptive. Some samples of special character below.

From http://www.lookuptables.com/

HTML Building Blocks

Writing In HTML

You can create an HTML document with any word processor or text editor (for example the notepad and wordpad.), or you can download or buy softwares like dreamweaver or Intype but if you really want to learn HTML without relying on any Web Page Editors then try to use notepad or wordpad for your basics in HTML.

HTML Tags

HTML tags are commands written between less than (<) and greater than (>) signs also known as angle brackets, that indicate how the browser should display the text. There are opening and closing versions for many but not all tags, and the affected text is contained within the two tags. Both the opening and closing tags use the same command word but the closing tag caries an initial extra forward slash symbol(/) for example <b>some content</b>.

Attributes

Many tags have a special attributes that offer a variety of options for the contained text. The attribute is entered between the command word and the final greater than symbol. Often, you can use a series of attributes in a single tag. Simply write one after the other in any order, with a space between each other.

Values

Attributes in turn often have values. In some cases, you must pick a value from a small group of choices, For example the border attribute for the tag table above can take values of 0-9 or much higher than 9, what ever you want the thickness of the border will be displayed, any other value given will be ignored like (nine).

Other attributes are more strict about the type of values they accept. For example the image tag on the first sample above src attribute only accept URLs for its value.

Quotation Marks

Generally speaking, values should be enclosed in straight quotation marks "". However, you can omit the quote marks if the value only contains letters (A-Z, a-z), digits and hyphens, or a period. I usually use quotes around URLs to ensure that they're not misinterpret by the server.