You may have visited a website before and noticed a heart symbol on that website. What you may have also wondered is how that heart symbol got on the website since there isn’t an easy keyboard entry that you can use. The answer is that an HTML entity was used.
HTML entities can be used to put characters on the web that can’t be used with the keyboard as regular typing. You may have seen HTML codes before, but just never realized what they were or how they were used. HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is basically a computer language that helps make websites become customizable.
What are HTML Entities?
An HTML entity is found several times on any given website. If you clicked on a link or saw an image that can’t be easily entered from a keyboard, then an HTML entity was used to display the information. HTML entities are strange looking codes that may look like jumbled letters and numbers if you don’t know what you are looking at. But it is those codes that make it possible to display the images that give websites a clean and fun appearance.
Each link or image has its own unique HTML entity that will allow it to display properly. If you’ve ever worked on a website before, then you likely know of some HTML entities. If you haven’t had any sort of experience working with HTML entities, then they may look like a foreign language to you.
The neat thing about them is that they can create just about any image on a website that can’t be created otherwise. When you are working in Microsoft Word or a similar program, you can simply upload some art or an image of what you want to see. However, when working on a website, it’s not that simple.
Heart Symbol as an HTML Entity
The heart symbol is one of the most popular HTML entities. The HTML code for the heart symbol is “♥” or “♥”. When you put in either one of those codes, you will see a small black heart symbol on your website.
The cool thing about using that code is that you can put the heart symbol anywhere you want on the website. You can use it as the bullets in a bulleted list, as spacers between words, as page breaks or even paragraph breaks. Once you learn how the HTML codes work, you will realize that it is even easier to use than many word processing programs.
While the heart symbol is one of the most popular HTML entities, there are plenty of others as well. For example, you can create a diamond, a club, a spade, bullets, brackets and a variety of other symbols. It may feel like you don’t have a need for all of the HTML entities, but once you see the value that the characters provide, you will quickly realize that you want to expand your knowledge and learn more about them.
Learning HTML Codes
If you want to learn how to use the heart symbol on your website, then there are plenty of online tutorials about how to use HTML codes. Once you understand what the codes mean and how they are used, you will realize that HTML isn’t too terribly complicated. Once you get the hang of it, you will find it easy and convenient to use HTML entities and will likely prefer using them over anything else.
Just imagine how much more fun your website would look if you were able to use a heart symbol or any other symbol throughout your site. Not only will you be impressed with what you created on your website, but you will also have a more visually pleasing website that is displayed to the world. When that happens, you will be attracting more visitors and people will continue to visit your website.
It may take a little bit of time to learn how and where to put your heart symbol on your website using an HTML entity. But the good thing about the process is that there are plenty of resources available to help you learn, and you can practice as often as you like to make it perfect!