Some characters are reserved in XHTML; for example you cannot use the greater than or less than signs or angle brackets within your text beacuse the browser could mistake them for markup. XHTML processors must support the five special characters listed in the table that follows:
To write an element and attribute into your page so that the code is shown to the user rather than being processed by the browser you need to escape the angled brackets and quotation marks. For example to write <div id="character">
you would write:
<div id="character">
There is also a long list of special characters that HTML 4.0 processors should support. In order for these to appear in your document, you can use either the numerical code or the entity name. For example to insert a copyright symbol you could use either of the following:
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