The HTML special characters they are part of a collection of characters, an encoding, that goes beyond the available characters that can be recorded with a normal keyboard. They include Greek letters, mathematical symbols, arrows, coins, dingbats (ornaments), and graphics, as well as checkmarks and copyright and trademark symbols. Additionally, HTML special characters are known as masked characters and HTML entities.
General information
HTML is linked to various rules and definitions as a text-based markup language that enables the display of HTML documents in web browsers. A standard is the required specification of the character set. These are the characters available in the markup language. A document is encoded and displayed based on a specific collection of characters.
However, since HTML documents are edited using traditional keyboards, it is possible to use combinations of characters on the keyboard to create special symbols. HTML special characters should be understood as one term in these combinations. They are the references between the character set and the webmaster who wants to write certain characters, to ensure an adequate representation of special characters. One translation method is, for example, URL encoding.
How HTML special characters are used
You can specify a character set with Hexadecimal notation, decimal and HTML entities (HTML 5). If special characters are written in one of these annotations, the client (browser) generates the corresponding special characters if it can read the font or load the font from the character set.
The character set is specified in the document metadata, which is transmitted from the server to the client with the first byte.
- From HTML 4:
- From HTML 5:
Currently all the characters of the UTF-8 character set can be used and the browser will encode the document according to this character set.
Examples of HTML special characters
If you want to use special characters in your web portal, you can refer to a list for help. Contains characters that can be listed in three variations. The simplest and most advanced is the mnemonic notation in HTML entities such as © for copyright.
- ©: The copyright symbol can be generated with the following characters (without spaces):
- & # xa 9;
- & # 1 6 9;
- & copy;
- ®: A registered trademark can therefore be annotated (without spaces):
- & # xad;
- & # 1 7 4;
- & reg;
- → The arrow to the right (without spaces):
- & # x 2 1 9 2;
- & # 8 5 9 4;
- →
Relevance for SEO
Special characters in HTML have always had implications for search engine optimization. For one thing, many browsers weren't able to interpret some characters, so users couldn't read them. The result- Poor usability indirectly affects search engine optimization, as users can leave the web portal. On the other hand, the search engines could not correctly interpret some special characters and, therefore, the crawler could not read the content.
This changed especially with HTML 4 and lastly with HTML 5. Although some browsers may still render characters incorrectly in some cases, search engine crawlers read the code correctly and then display it in the SERPs. Google converts all websites to UTF-8 before they are read from the index database server and displayed to the user in the results lists.
Special characters are used at this time to attract users to websites and increase the click-through rate. This also applies to the content of HTML files and meta description and title tags.
The use of HTML special characters can also explain certain connotations of the strings. For example, special characters are used to identify telephone numbers with a symbol or to symbolically mark individual expressions. With special characters, the character strings get a graphical level that indicates the importance of the string. This is in addition to rich snippets and structured data, another small step towards the semantic web. A consequence of using too many special characters is the increased loading time of the site[1].
