Biz: What happened to Ampersand?
You even need to escape Ampersands within URLs.
Ampersands in particular are bedeviling for web writers.
This is because the Ampersand(&) operator is for text concatenation.
Today I found out where the Ampersand symbol and name came from.
If you use an Ampersand as part of an HTML entity, it remains unchanged;
Within a code block, Ampersands(&) and angle brackets(<
and>) are automatically converted into HTML entities.
However, inside Markdown code spans and blocks,
angle brackets and Ampersands are always encoded automatically.
Further, the Ampersand symbol used to appear at the end of the English alphabet: ….
By the mid-19th century,
this led to the symbol itself officially appearing in English dictionaries as“Ampersand”.
If the citation is in
parentheses and you need to use the word"and", use the Ampersand('&') instead.
With a code span, Ampersands and angle brackets are encoded as HTML entities automatically,
which makes it easy to include example HTML tags.
This is similar to
modern day texters who commonly use the Ampersand in place of the letters“and” in a word, such as: l& for“land”.
Tiro developed a stenographic shorthand system that also included a shorthand version of“et”,
which preceded the first known usage of the Ampersand by about 100-200 years.
Design: A new site icon + logo(if you look closely,
you will see the Ampersand has a heart on top and a brain on the bottom, which I just LOVE!)!
This makes it very easy to include example HTML source code using Markdown- just paste it and indent it,
and Markdown will handle the hassle of encoding the Ampersands and angle brackets.
However, Tiro's symbol was not the combination of“et”, as the Ampersand symbol is,
and was different in form than the Ampersand symbol, being closer to a modern day 7 or, more aptly, was a backwards capital gamma:.