"Bringing understanding and awareness of eBay Stores"
eBay Store owners dedicated to sharing knowledge
and resources for a better shopping community
|
eBay Store owners dedicated to sharing knowledge |
Character Entity Codes |
| There are so many uses for Character Entity Codes, but I will touch on two to start with. Non-breaking Space The most common character entity in HTML is the non-breaking space. Normally HTML will cut spaces in your text. If you write 10 spaces in your text, HTML will remove 9 of them. Why I use them, is after a sentence where we usually space twice after the period, it will remove the second space. To add spaces to your text, use the character entity. If you use the non-breaking space in your listings or ME pages after each of your sentences, it makes your text clean looking and so much easier to read. Especially when there is a lot of text. If you notice, the above paragraph shows nicely with the extra space after each sentence. I will now retype the above sentence showing where I placed the character entity coding. The most common character entity in HTML is the non-breaking space. Normally HTML will cut spaces in your text. If you write 10 spaces in your text, HTML will remove 9 of them. Why I use them, is after a sentence where we usually space twice after the period, it will remove the second space. To add spaces to your text, use the character entity. If you use the non-breaking space in your listings or ME pages after each of your sentences, it makes your text clean looking and so much easier to read. Especially when there is a lot of text. For all the codes, refer to http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_entitiesref.asp Hiding Email Addresses This is an absolute must if you use an email address link in either your ME page or website etc. Many spammers have automatic programs, called spiders or robots or spam-bots, that crawl the web to harvest email addresses, create mailing lists and then sell those mailing lists. By coding or hiding your email address, this means that when spam-bots try to gather email addresses from your page, virtually none of them can read the addresses, resulting I find in a huge decrease in the amount of spam you receive. It isn't 100% foolproof (spammers get smarter every day) and it won't stop anyone who manually searches, but even if you reduce your spam email by 50%, it is well worth it! As an example, on our website I have our email address, and most people would write the code as <a href="mailto:info@bulletpens.ca"> When entering your email address, the very minimum you should replace is the @ with the @ character entity. Now, being the super careful and paranoid gal I am, I also like to take this further and I code all the remaining letters using the 7-BIT Printable ASCII Characters, replacing each letter with their applicable Entity Number. Refer to http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_asciiref.asp for the list. If you don't want to replace all the letters, then again, at least code the mailto portion of it. So using these entity numbers, I fully code our email address when used online as <a href="mailto:inf o@bulletpen s.ca"> |
| Return |