Why are HTML character entities necessary?

Question

Why are HTML character entities necessary? What good are they? I don\'t see the point.

Answer 1

"1 < 2" lets you put "1 < 2" in your page.

Long answer:

Since HTML uses '<' to open tags, you can't just type '<' if you want that as text. Therefore, you have to have a way to say "I want the text < in my page". Whoever designed HTML (or, actually SGML, HTML's predecessor) decided to use '&something;', so you can also put things like non-breaking space: ' ' (spaces that are not collapsed or allow a line break). Of course, now you need to have a way to say '&', so you get '&'...