Over the past month or so my girlfriend has been talking to me and asking advice about website design, since she’s after progressing her career in the future to become some sort of digital designer or web designer. Pretty neat, eh 
Anyway, after talking to one of the designers at my job (I’m not officially a designer, but rather a web developer you see. Oo-er), he asked would she be learning HTML and/or CSS as well. I asked her and she wasn’t too keen on it, but then after looking through numerous job adverts it become apparent that most, if not all, require a website designer to have such skills.
So, then become the task of teaching her the basis of HTML & CSS, which was actually quite fun. She’s picking it up really well, I think, and I’m supprised how quickly she’s picking it up.
I realised, however, there is just so many things to teach when starting out from fresh. One of the things was to use ASCII characters in replacement to just hitting [shift] and a special-character on the keyboard. I explained that using ASCII characters is a safer bet, but most importantly, helps in making the site valid.
Then I thought I would blog about it, posting up here the most common ASCII characters I use, and their code…
« = « = left double angle quotes » = » = right double angle quotes © = © = copyright sign £ = £ = pound sign & = & = ampersand
Can’t really think of any others I use regularly…? Thought it might help someone anyway, maybe – at least instead of looking through those giant-sized horrible ASCII tables!
I promise I’m not blog-stalking you!
I had this rant at work yesterday actually – the company I’m at now is the first where the “web designer” skillset hasn’t encompassed HTML and CSS – essentially drawing pictures of websites, I don’t think is enough to earn a decent salary (I think a web designer should be (X)HTML, CSS and Javascript – they’re all aspects of design!).
With regard to your HTML entity codes – I’m a big user of > and < as well as ‘ and ’ (hope you’re escaping these!) – I’ve also found myself using ™ a lot recently. For anything else, there’s leftlogic.com/lounge/articles/... or the charmap bundled with your OS choice to look up the Unicode reference and &#code;