Some ASCII characters require special HTML Tags, otherwise the browser will be unable to decode them.

For example, the "ampersand" symbol: & without the proper HTML tag will look like this:

You may have noticed that there is nothing after the ":". This is because your browser will ignore the plain "&" symbol without the following tag: &

Some Tags you may use often:

Symbol	HTML	Appearance
Ampersand Less Than Greater Than Copyright Trademark Quote Cent Degree Midline dot Paragraph Section Blank Space	&amp; &lt; &gt; &copy; &reg; &quot; &cent; &deg; &middot; &para; &sect; &nbsp;	& < > © ® " ¢ ° · ¶ §

For a complete list of "Special Character Entity Names", check out:
http://www.sandia.gov/sci_compute/symbols.html