ASCII encoding in HTML

• All characters have a basic numerical code.
• A small set of standard alphabetic, numerical and punctuation characters are defined in the table expressing the ASCII encoding function, for example:

  Decimal Hexadecimal (Hex) Octal

• In HTML text descriptions, any character in the ASCII table may be represented in any one of three main ways:
  1. by itself,
  2. encoded in ASCII hexadecimal notation, enclosed in & ... ;, e.g. <, > for ``<'' and ``>'', respectively,
  3. or by a special name, e.g. < and > for ``<'' and ``>'', meaning ``less than'' and ``greater than'', respectively.