it is still a common practice to convert the hexadecimal code point into a decimal value (for example &#21512; instead of &#x5408;). Named character entities In HTML 4, there is a standard set of 252 named character entities for characters - some common, some obscure - that are either not found in certain character encodings or are markup sensitive in some contexts (for example angle brackets and quotation marks). Although any Unicode character can be referenced by its numeric code point, some HTML document authors prefer to use these named entities instead, where possible, as they are less cryptic and were better supported by early browsers. Character entities can be included in an HTML document via the use of entity references, which take the form &EntityName;, where EntityName is the name of the entity. For example, &mdash;, much like &#8212; or &#x2014;, represents : the em dash character "—" even if the character encoding used doesn't contain that character. For the full list, see: List of XML and HTML character entity references. Character encoding determination In order to correctly process HTML, a web browser must ascertain which Unicode characters are represented by the encoded form of an HTML document. In order to do this, the web browser must know what encoding was used. Encoding information When a document is transmitted via a MIME message or a transport that uses MIME content types such as an HTTP response, the message may signal the encoding via a Content-Type header, such as Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8. Other external means of declaring encoding are permitted but rarely used. If the document uses a Unicode encoding, the encoding info might also be present in the form of a byte order mark (BOM). Finally, the encoding can be declared via the HTML syntax. For the text/html serialisation then, as long as the page is encoded in an extension of ASCII (such as UTF-8, and thus, not if the page is using UTF-16), a meta element, like <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> or (starting with HTML5) <meta charset="UTF-8"> can be used. For HTML pages serialized as XML, then declaration options is to either rely on the encoding default (which for XML documents is UTF-8), or to use an XML encoding declaration. The meta attribute plays no role in HTML served as XML. Encoding defaults An encoding default applies when there is no external or internal encoding declaration and also