Character Codes
This example was located on the Bio page of a professional photographer. Any clue as to what that gobbledygook is supposed to be? We won’t even get into the non-readibility of the colors on his page. That’s for another tip!
Using HTML coded characters.
Some browsers do not display certain characters properly, unless the HTML coded character set is used. Instead of what should be there, a jumbled mess is left in its place.
What are HTML coded characters?
Let’s first look at what a character is. Per W3C specifications, guidelines, and definitions, the following define character, character references and character entity references:
character
An atom of information, for example a letter or a digit. Graphic characters have associated glyphs, whereas control characters have associated processing semantics.
A, a, 1, 5, ¢, $, @, are all examples of characters.
character references
…when hardware or software configurations do not allow users to input some document characters directly, authors may use SGML character references. Character references are a character encoding-independent mechanism for entering any character from the document character set.
, a , 1 , 5 , ¢ , $ , @ , are some examples as above, but written as character references. Also called Character Code.
Character entity references use symbolic names so that authors need not remember code positions. Character entity references are case-sensitive. Not all character references have character entity references.
none , none , none , none , ¢ , none , none , are some examples as above, but written as character entity references. As you can see, the only character that had a character entity reference is the cent symbol.
Why is it important that you understand about character codes? So that you, as a professional photographer, can keep your web presence looking professional. If you do not code your own pages, then make sure that the webmaster understands about character codes, and that not all browsers understand gobbledygook.
