doc-charset.sgm

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<h1 id=datachrs>Characters, Words, and Paragraphs

An HTML user agent should present the body of an HTML document as a
collection of typeset paragraphs and preformatted text. Except for
preformatted elements (<tag/PRE/, <tag/XMP/, <tag/LISTING/,
<tag/TEXTAREA/), each block structuring element is regarded as a
paragraph by taking the data characters in its content and the content
of its descendant elements, concatenating them, and splitting the
result into words, separated by space, tab, or record end characters
(and perhaps hyphen characters). The sequence of words is typeset as a
paragraph by breaking it into lines.

<h2 id=charlist>The HTML Document Character Set

The document character set specified in <hdref refid=decl> must be
supported by HTML user agents. It includes the graphic characters of
Latin Alphabet No. 1, or simply Latin-1.  Latin-1 comprises 191
graphic characters, including the alphabets of most Western European
languages.
<note>Use of the non-breaking space and soft hyphen indicator characters is 
discouraged because support for them is not widely deployed.
</note>
<note>
To support non-western writing systems, a larger character repertoire
will be specified in a future version of HTML. The document character
set will be [ISO-10646], or some subset that agrees with [ISO-10646];
in particular, all numeric character references must use code
positions assigned by [ISO-10646].
</note>

In SGML applications, the use of control characters is limited in
order to maximize the chance of successful interchange over
heterogeneous networks and operating systems. In the HTML document
character set only three control characters are allowed: Horizontal
Tab, Carriage Return, and Line Feed (code positions 9, 13, and 10).

The HTML DTD references the Added Latin 1 entity set, to allow
mnemonic representation of selected Latin 1 characters using only the
widely supported ASCII character repertoire. For example:

<listing><![CDATA[
Kurt G&ouml;del was a famous logician and mathematician.
]]></listing>

See <hdref refid="lat1ent"> for a table of the "Added Latin 1"
entities, and <hdref refid="iso-latin-1"> for a table of the code
positions of [ISO 8859-1] and the control characters in the HTML
document character set.