Certain characters can't be typed in using the keyboard because they serve a special function. When a web browser looks at a web page it looks for the "<" and ">" characters to figure out what is HTML tags, and what should be displayed. If that's the case, then we can't use < and > for anything else. So how do we show them in the page? It would make writing THIS page a pain in the butt!
We use a special sequence of characters that the browser will recognize as a command to print a specific character. In this case we use < and > to represent the < and >. This is what is called an 'escape sequence'.
ESCAPE SEQUENCE
All escape sequences begin with the ampersand ( & ), and end with a semi-colon ( ; ). You can place a special set of letters to designate a special character, or you can use the ASCII code for a character. This allows you to print nearly any character the computer can display.
Here is a table of special characters:
| Character | Escape Sequence | Character | Escape Sequence | |
| < | < | > | > | |
| & | & | " | " | |
| · | · | © | © | |
| ® | ® | ™ | ™ | |
| “ | “ | ” | ” | |
| (non-breaking space) | |