Manuscript for HTML Tutorial #8

Listed below is the manuscript of all textual instructions used in HTML Tutorial #8 - Inserting Special Characters into Your Web Page. Most of this text is displayed inside the yellow balloons used to guide viewers as they watch the lessons.

Students and instructors may find it helpful to have a hard copy of these balloon instructions. You may print this web page to use as an aide in following, referencing, or demonstrating the web design series.

Manuscript Table of Contents

Entire HTML Tutorial Series

Tutorial #8 - Inserting Special Characters into Your Web Page

Lesson #8: Special Characters. Click the play button to begin the tutorial.
Sometimes you'll want to use a character on your web page that's just not available on a regular keyboard.
Fortunately there's a special code you can use to add these types of characters to your page.
Let's put a copyright symbol right here, using what's called a Numeric Character Reference.
All character references need to start with an ampersand '&'.
Next we will enter the character's numeric code position.
For the copyright symbol, this position is #169.
Then we need to end our character reference with a semicolon ';'.
Let's check it out.
We now have a copyright symbol.
Every type of character that you can use has its own number.
But it's difficult to try and remember all of those numbers.
So, the more common characters allow you to use what's called a Character Entity Reference.
The designated word for the copyright symbol is copy.
Notice that we still start the code with an ampersand...
...and still finish the code with a semicolon.
Let's include the rest of our copyright notice, and then view the results.
Now, these 4 characters have a special use in writing HTML.
If you want any one of these to actually appear on your web page, you should make it using its character reference.
Otherwise, if you just type it in, the web browser may confuse it as being part of your HTML, and your page may not display correctly.
If you're interested in the code for other characters, there is a list, titled Special Characters, available in our references section.
OK, you're now ready to watch Lesson #9.

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