One of my readers recently asked me about my inclination to use accented vowels in my posts. Stuff like ‘vis-à-vis’, ‘über’, ‘résumé’. It’s not really necessary, but to me it looks pretty. So there. She did ask me to teach her how to get these accented vowels (and consonants) to display on web pages. I think I’ll share it with everyone who’ll care to read through.

It’s not complex, trust me. They’re what you call HTML Special Characters — “special” because they’re not normally accessible via an English keyboard. So, to display them, you need to know their names and the proper coding. Here are a bunch of them:

If you notice, the character names are enclosed by an ampersand (&) and a semi-colon. These marks tell your browser to display the whole code as a special character. Obviously, there are more than what’s presented above, but I’ve tried to give the most commonly-used in English as well as in other European languages. To capitalize, simply replace the first letter after the ampersand with the capital letter.

There you go! If you’re one of those people with the Spanish ñ in your name, now you can have it displayed the right way on your blog.

Aside from spitting out fancy letters, this &code; construct has a little more oomph to it. There are also a few symbols that it can generate. To wit:

For careful coding, it’s always a good idea to use & to display the ampersand — just to make sure it’s not going to turn into another character you didn’t intend.
Blog on!

Posts at Random

• 29 July 2007 -- You got blogged! contest
• 27 March 2008 -- Me on YouTube!
• 29 March 2008 -- Davao Blogs Directory
• 15 March 2008 -- And I’m back…
• 27 September 2007 -- Blogging 101 seminar-workshops
• 22 May 2007 -- 5 revealing things about me
• 3 February 2007 -- Nihon-yuki