### Character Entities

As with any syntactic language, WML has certain characters that have special meaning. The two most obvious of these characters are the < and > symbols, which surround all tags. These characters cannot be typed in directly if the designer's intent is to display these characters. Thus, all characters that can be displayed in a Web browser have numeric values assigned to them. The numeric values are entered into the source Web page as &#nnn; where nnn is a three-digit value. For example, the < symbol is entered as '&#060;'.

In addition, many of these characters also have names assigned. Name values are entered into the source Web page as &name; where name is the WML name associated with this character. For example, the < symbol would be entered as '&lt;'. The browser fully supports the set of characters defined by the World Wide Web Consortium in conformance with the standard.

For convenience, here are a few of these key symbols:

Description | Symbol | Numeric Entity | Name Entity
--- | --- | --- | ---
double quotation | “ | &#34; | &quot;
ampersand | & | &#38; | &amp;
apostrophe | ‘ | &#39; | &apos;
less than | < | &#60; | &lt;