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] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

There's not enough symbols on my keyboard, so let's invent a code so we can write other symbols

  1. lets say & means start of code
  2. and say ; means end of code
  3. Between the start and end is the code

Now let's make some real symbols

  • ¢ can be ¢
  • © can be ©
  • ÷ can be ÷

I want to tell other people how to use our new code, but if I tell them to "just write ÷" it'll turn my message into "just write ÷" !! So how can we fix this?

What if we make & its own code?

  • & —> &
  • ÷ —> ÷ ???

Yes! That'll work :)

This is how & came to be, and it's specifically used in HTML as a way to write those symbols above (and escape other a few other symbols for similar reasons we did with &)

As for why & shows up as &, there are 2 main places I can see this happening:

  1. The editor you use to write it automatically converts an & —> &. But the user typed in & (making it &). I think this is most likely. I'm guessing the title of posts automatically do the conversion, but the post body and comments do not because it uses a raw markdown editor
  2. In some contexts the & specifically doesn't get converted? like how you can write `&` to get & as opposed to seeing ＆
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Lol, ok there might be a little more than what meets the eye, cuz when i type `&` (without amp;) it converted it to & !!

new challenge- try to get it to render a & instead of & inside of `` (or ``` ``` for bulk testing)

tried:

  • `&`
  • `&`
  • `&`
  • `&;`
  • `&<invisible character>`
  • `&divide;` still becomes `÷` weirdly enough

I kinda cheated cuz its not the same character... but I got it to show by using the japanese monospaced & (＆)

test: ＆

＆