Decimal characters and UTF-8 encoding
To enter almost any character that has a diacritic??”such as ??, ?±, or ????”in Dreamweaver, you must explicitly
enter the corresponding decimal character into your HTML page. As mentioned in the preceding section,
decimal characters take the form of &#number;, where the number can range from 00 to 255. Not all
numbers have matching symbols; the sequence from 14 through 31 is currently unused. The upper range
(127 through 159), only partially supported by Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, is now deemed
invalid by the W3C. In addition, not all fonts have characters for every entity.
Dreamweaver uses UTF-8 encoding for characters higher than 127. UTF-8 is an ASCII-compatible version
of Unicode character set. Unicode provides a unique number for every character in every language; however,
the raw Unicode number is rendered in 16-bit words, unreadable by browsers??”a problem solved by
UTF-8.
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Accessing the Code Directly 6
UTF-8 also uses numbers, but does away with the upper limit of 255. For example, the UTF-8 encoding for
the trademark symbol is ™, whereas the no-longer??“used number entity is ™. Fortunately, you
don??™t have to remember complex codes??”all you have to do is use the Character objects.
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