Sorting through my old bookmarks today I came across a useful and pretty exhaustive list of HTML codes thanks to the guys at ascii.cl. It’s amazing how many people don’t reference characters correctly when coding, especially in these multilingual times. Maybe they don’t know, maybe they just don’t care..

For anyone who’s not sure what I mean by an HTML code, it’s a set of standard characters which a browser will interpret as one special character. These begin with an ampersand (&) and end with a semicolon (;). It’s all to do with text encoding which is not something that can be concisely explained here, but for instance if you write £ in HTML it’s not guaranteed it will always display as £. You should use the HTML name £ or the HTML number £ to display the £ character.

It seems increasingly fashionable, if somewhat worrying, to push beta releases to the unsuspecting general public. I’m as keen to see the release of Internet Explorer 8 as the next developer, not least because it will be the first Microsoft browser to run in standards compliant mode by default; but it does concern me when I visit the IE homepage and am greeted by a big advert inviting me to download IE8 beta with the tag line “Introducing Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 - faster, easier, and safer than ever.” Is the average web user aware that beta means it is potentially unstable or insecure pre-release software put out there purely for testing purposes? I doubt it.