HTML Comments & Characters

<p>Copyright &#xA9; 2026</p>

The hexadecimal number A9 is the same Unicode code point as decimal 169.

More Examples

Both decimal and hexadecimal forms can represent many Unicode characters. For everyday writing, you can usually type the actual character directly when the document uses an appropriate encoding such as UTF-8.

Important Technical Note

Numeric character references represent Unicode code points, not UTF-8 byte sequences. For example, 😀 represents the Unicode code point U+1F600. It does not mean that the HTML source must contain the UTF-8 bytes written as a numeric reference.

6. Displaying HTML Code Examples as Text

When teaching HTML, you often need to display markup without allowing the browser to interpret it as real markup.

For example, if you want the browser to display the following code:

<h1>Hello World</h1>

You need to escape the angle brackets in the surrounding HTML source:

<pre><code>&lt;h1&gt;Hello World&lt;/h1&gt;</code></pre>

The browser decodes the character references and displays the markup as text inside the code block.

Displaying an Ampersand in Code

Suppose you want to show this HTML:

<a href="search.php?topic=html&page=2">Search</a>

When embedding that example inside an actual HTML page, the ampersand in the displayed code must also be escaped in the surrounding source:

<pre><code>&lt;a href="search.php?topic=html&amp;page=2"&gt;Search&lt;/a&gt;</code></pre>

There are two separate contexts here:

• The outer HTML source must use character references so the browser treats the example as text.
• The displayed example shows what a developer might write in an HTML attribute.

Practical rule: When displaying code examples inside HTML, escape the markup characters in the example so they are displayed rather than executed or interpreted as page structure.