6.1. The HTML Document Character Set

The document character set specified in 9.5, "SGML Declaration for HTML" 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 - 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].

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:

   Kurt Gödel was a famous logician and mathematician.

See 9.7.2, "ISO Latin 1 Character Entity Set" for a table of the "Added Latin 1" entities, and 13, "The HTML Coded Character Set" for a table of the code positions of [ISO 8859-1] and the control characters in the HTML document character set.