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HTML

Jacky Chau
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Jacky Chau
Full Stack JavaScript Techdegree Student 8,106 Points
Posted by Jacky Chau
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Jacky Chau
Full Stack JavaScript Techdegree Student 8,106 Points

HTML Entities

It is said that some characters are reserved in HTML, like ">" and "<" . So, instead of writing n>5 , we should write n&gt5

However, I tried writing n>5 and the browser could still show the ">" sign successfully. So, is character entity just unnecessary?

Thank you.

1 Answer

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,261 Points
Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,261 Points

Reserved characters might get printed correctly in some cases, but relying on them to print as they are will make your code "brittle" to future changes. Using the character entity guarantees proper display both now and after possible future page modifications and/or across different browsers.

Also, character entities begin with an ampersand ("&") and end with a semicolon (";"). So the correct sequence to display "n>5" would be "n&gt;5".