this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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Explain Like I'm Five

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What happens to the ampersand on the internet? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I feel like whenever I see the ampersand on this website, it’s followed with “amp;”. I’ve noticed it other places on the internet also. Why does this happen? Is it some programming thing?

Just for a test: &

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The reason is because a programmer at some point decide that & should indicate the start of a special symbol in HTML. In programming parlance this is a means of “escaping” characters which are reserved.

For example, in HTML, things look something like this:

<p>Hello, World!</p>

The p in the less than and greater symbol symbols means “paragraph” where the ending version with the slash means “the paragraph is done”.

However, there’s a problem. What if you wanted to actually type out <p> to the end-user and have it not be treated as HTML? You use the ampersand syntax to write &lt; by using &lt; and > by using >.

</p><p>&lt;p></p>

Yet another problem: If we use &amp; as a special character in HTML, we also need a way to display it—the answer is &amp;