All that &stuff;
(because someone was asking)

Computers are very good at dealing with numbers. But how do you represent letters and symbols in a computer? A long time ago people had the idea of using a code where a different number stood for each symbol.

Take the letter "A", for example. In the common code called ASCII, that has the number 65: whenever you get an A on your screen, it's most likely represented as the number 65 inside your computer. B is 66, C is 67, and so on.

ASCII has a little over a hundred symbols in it. Soon, people began to want more, especially people who wanted to speak languages other than U.S. English. Some people wanted accented vowels, Spanish speakers wanted the n-tilde, British people wanted the pound sign, and so on. There were a number of codes proposed which could deal with some of these symbols, but eventually one code arose that could handle all of them: Unicode. Unicode is huge. It begins with the same symbols as ASCII, but its code numbers go on much higher-- up beyond 90,000. You can use it to write pretty much any language, and they're still working on adding new ones.

So suppose you're writing an LJ post, and you want to write the sign for pounds sterling. Of course, you could just press the key if you have it on your keyboard, or copy and paste it from somewhere else. But there's another way: in Unicode it has the number 163. HTML lets you write

£

to get £. You can insert any Unicode character this way, even the weird ones like pictures of telephones (which happens to be Unicode number 9743, so you'd write ☏). Of course, if your computer doesn't have a picture of a telephone in its font, it won't be able to draw it, so you'll probably just get a box or something. ☏.

A lot of the characters get used quite often, so HTML has a mnemonic system, too. If you want an e-acute (é), just type

é

and you won't have to look up the code number for the symbol. There's also £ for £, ¢ for ¢, and many others; there are some lists here.