Is there any way to define custom special characters in HTML? [duplicate]

Question

W3 have defined symbols &mail; and &telephone; in a draft proposal. I'd like to start using those now, even though they're not yet official.

Is there some way I can define this; e.g. &telephone; = ☎?

My guess it it's not possible, and it's not really much of an issue - just curious as being able to create such custom character mappings could be interesting.

http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-wwwicn.html

Answer 1

it would be really easy to implement this JavaScript.

var el=document.getElementById('element');
el.innerHTML=el.innerHTML.replace(/\&telephone\;/g,'☎').replace(...........

It's a much better idea though to do this on the server side. e.g. in PHP you could use the strreplace($needle,$haystack) function or define a telephone constant.

define('telephone','&#x260e');
//...
echo'<span>',telephone,' 001 23456789</span>';