We're going to get obscure about HTML development. In fact, we're going to get so obscure that we're going to pick on one very small, picayune character aspect of HTML development: how to represent special characters and symbols.

First, let me give a teensy bit of background. Here at ZATZ, we use, as publication names, trademarks that we have licensed from their owners. For example, PalmPower is a trademark that we've licensed from 3Com and Windows CE Power is a trademark that we've licensed from Microsoft. As part of our licensing agreement with 3Com, we are required to use the TM symbol, the trademark symbol, next to "the first and most prominent use of the mark". Now, the most prominent use of the mark is the logo on the main page. But the first use of the mark is in the ZATZ navigational bar at the top of the screen. So, although it annoyed me from a design sense, I decided that the little TM symbol had to go next to the name of each of the publications on the navigation bar, as well next to the logo itself. The lawyers felt that it would be fine to say, for example, "PalmPower (TM)" as part of the menu. But, personally, I figured it would look uglier than hell.

I wanted to use, as it's used in most clean typographic work, a very small superscripted TM. Fortunately, or so I thought, HTML provides the ability to do this using codes for special symbols. These codes are called ISO character sets. They are, for example, the ways that you would show the less than sign as a leftward facing bracket. In fact, since the less than sign is used very heavily throughout HTML to delimit tags, using it in regular prose would confuse the HTML. So, to represent a less than sign, what you actually have to do is create a character string in your HTML that's represented as < which, if you look at it, kind of means a special symbol that is the less than sign.

There are key characters that act as special signals to the browser. They're used to tell it that a string of characters is meant to be replaced by a symbol rather than just reproduced in-line or interpreted as HTML instructions. The first character is the ampersand ('&'). This starts a special character string and tells the browser that everything that follows is a character code rather than an ordinary string of characters of HTML tags. Now, sometimes following the ampersand, is the pound sign, otherwise known as the number sign ('#'). If the number sign exists and is following the ampersand, this sequence tells the browser that what follows is a string of numbers that corresponds to a special character code for the symbol. This is looked up in an ISO table and replaced with the actual, physical character. Sometimes this little beasty is called a "numeric entity". If the character immediately following the ampersand is not the pound sign, then it's interpreted as a special string that describes the character. For example, the letters 'l' and 't' are for the less than (i.e., 'l' for "less", and 't' for "than") sign. At the very end of this little parade of characters is the semicolon (';'). This tells the browser that the special symbol sequence is over.