Two Different Types of Character Entities?

Question

Clearly there are two different types of character entities in HTML/XML.

There are the ones that are specified by numbers, i.e. < and >

And then there are the ones that are specified by letters, < and >

Is there a specific name for each of these types of character entities, or are they just "character entities that are specified by numbers and character entities that are specified by letters?

Answer 1

These are numeric character references (<) and character entities (<).

Character entities are defined as a sequence of character references - for instance, nbsp is defined as  .

When processed, character entities are converted to the corresponding character references.

By the way - a character entity can be defined as more than one character reference, though this has not been done in XML or HTML.