The standard used to define entities is called ISO Latin-1. Today, many pages do have special characters anyway, since most browsers will understand them. If you're not using entities, you should include <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> in the head-section of your page.
Special Characters
There are a few characters that must be coded in different ways since they are otherwise used to define HTML-code, unless they are used within a set of SAMP-tags. You may use quotes and amps in the text, but not in tags (such as the ALT-text of an IMG-tag). These letters are
< #60 <
> #62 >
& #38 &
> #62 >
Also the non-breaking space entity is useful, since the browser normally won't care about multiple spaces, while multiple non-breaking spaces can be used as a simple way to add some horizontal space.
  #160
Other Special Characters
Some of these characters cannot be printed in Courier, which is used here, or in Times that is the standard www-font. If you need characters that doesn't appear correctly, make it as a picture instead.
