wml entities are to represent symbols that either can't easily be typed in or that have a special meaning in wml.
for example, if you put a < character into your text normally, the browser thinks it's the start of a tag; the browser then complains when it can't find the matching > character to end the tag.
following table displays the three forms of entities in wml. named entities are something you may be familiar with from html: they look like & or <, and they represent a single named character via a mnemonic name. entities can also be entered in one of two numeric forms (decimal or hexadecimal), allowing you to enter any unicode character into your wml.
| named entity | decimal entity | hexa entity | character |
|---|---|---|---|
| " | " | " | double quote (") |
| & | & | & | ampersand (&) |
| ' | ' | ' | apostrophe (') |
| < | < | < | less than (<) |
| > | > | > | greater than (>) |
| |   |   | nonbreaking space |
| ­ | ­ | ­ | soft hyphen |
note that all entities start with an ampersand ( &) and end with a semicolon ( ;). this semicolon is very important: some web pages forget this and cause problems for browsers that want correct html. wap browsers also are likely to be stricter about errors like these.