HTML level 2.0 characters

Characters less than 128

All the normal printable characters, from 32 to 126, are available directly or as &#xxx;, where xxx is the number of the character. The only sub-32 characters that are available are 	 (horizontal tab) and 
 (line feed).

Named entities

There are a four named characters in the HTML 2.0 specification which refer to characters less than character number 128. These exist because they refer to characters which have special meaning in HTML markup and which therefore can't be used directly (note that the closing ';' in necessary):

Top-bit-set characters

A wide range of top-bit set characters is available in HTML 2.0, which can be referred to both by number and by name. The numbers are derived from the same ISO 8859/1 standard as those in RISC OS, so the numbers are the same as those that you would use with the Alt-key and the numeric keypad. Note that not all of the characters available in RISC OS are defined in HTML, though.

Don't use top-bit-set characters directly in HTML. The top bit may be lost in transmission. Note both that the trailing ';' is necessary, and that these entities are case-sensitive:

In practice, most browsers now understand the range of characters from number 161 upwards, including £, the pound sign, and ©, the copyright symbol. However, they are strictly speaking not defined in the standard.