Character Entities
Standard entity sets for SGML and some of its derivatives have been developed as mnemonic devices, to ease document authoring when there is a need to use characters that are not easily typed or that are not widely supported by legacy character encodings. Each such entity consists of just one character from the Universal Character Set. Although any character can be referenced using a numeric character reference, a character entity reference allows characters to be referenced by name instead of code point.
HTML 4, for example, has 252 built-in character entities that don't have to be explicitly declared. XML has five. XHTML has the same five as XML, but if its DTDs are explicitly used, then it has 253 (' being the extra entity beyond those in HTML 4).
Read more about this topic: SGML Entity
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