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The following are symbols which may confuse some browsers. Should they be interpreted as code or text? If you want these characters to display on a web page, it's best to use their numeric entities. For example, if you want the character © to appear on your web page, it's best to use (©) in your HTML code. Since the following numeric entities are official, standard and vendor-neutral, they will work for HTML, XML, and SGML.

Please note that you could also embed the UTF-8 or UTF-16 characters directly into the text if you have it, and set the UTF-8 charset in your HTML meta tag, but this may not work on text browsers like Lynx, and for people who rely on text rendering.

Microsoft has its own character set (windows-1252 charset), but it's nonstandard. It's not supported for all browsers and can also cause problems with existing standards. The same goes for HTML hexadecimal numeric character entities (such as ’). It has inconsistent support and can cause problems.

These are symbols which may or may not be on your keyboard, and their corresponding Named and Numeric entities defined for HTML. You can use these entities in the HTML code to display these symbols on the browser, but whether or not these symbols actually get shown depends on the computer platform and font used, although you have a much better chance if you use Numeric entities. Using these entities does give compliance with html/xhtml standards.

For more details, Alan Wood has a great reference page: HTML 4.01 Character Entity References
Here are some common ones: