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What happens to the ampersand on the internet?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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The reason is because a programmer at some point decide that
&should indicate the start of a special symbol in HTML. In programming parlance this is a means of “escaping” characters which are reserved.For example, in HTML, things look something like this:
The p in the less than and greater symbol symbols means “paragraph” where the ending version with the slash means “the paragraph is done”.
However, there’s a problem. What if you wanted to actually type out
<p>to the end-user and have it not be treated as HTML? You use the ampersand syntax to write<by using<and>by using>.Yet another problem: If we use
&as a special character in HTML, we also need a way to display it—the answer is&