In addition to any mechanism by which characters may be represented by the encoding of the HTML document, it is possible to explicitly reference the printing characters of the Latin-1 character encoding using a numeric character reference.

There are two principle cases for using a numeric character reference. Firstly, some keyboards may not provide the necessary characters (such as those that use accents, cedilla's, dieresis marks etc.,) commonly used in European languages. Secondly, some characters would be interpreted as SGML coding (e,g, the ampersand &, double quotes " and lesser < and greater than > characters) and so should be referred to by numerical references.

Numeric character references are represented in an HTML document as SGML entities whose name is number sign (#) followed by a numeral from 32-126 and 161-255. The HTML DTD includes a numeric character for each of the printing characters of the Latin-1 encoding, so that one may reference them by number if it is inconvenient to enter them directly:

E.g. the ampersand (&#38;), double quotes (&#34;), lesser (&#60;) and greater (&#62;) characters

The following entity names are used in HTML, always prefixed by ampersand (&) and followed by a semicolon. This list, sorted numerically, is derived from ISO-8859-1 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character set:

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