ASCII stands for American Standard Code Information Exchange. The predominant character set encoding of present-day computers. Is a code for representing English characters as numbers, with each letter assigned a number from 0 to 127. To make special characters appear on a web page you use the ASCII equivilent number, like so:
To display a copyright symbol © you would use ©
For proper display you always use the ampersand sign, number sign, the symbols number and a semi-colon must go at the end.
Below is a example using html code included.
<p> © 2002 Southern Twilight</p>
It produces this: © 2002 Southern Twilight
A question I get asked frequently is how to make html code be visible on a page and not execute. Its done using the ASCII code equivalents of the less than and greater than symbols. This way it is interpreted as just text and not real html code so it does not execute and it shows up on the page. Since html code uses the less than < and the greater than > symbols, you can use their ASCII equivalents. Its coded like so:
<p>A paragraph goes between these tags.</p>
Here is how it displays on the page
<p>A paragraph goes between these tags.</p>
Pretty cool little trick.