Is " " a replacement of " "?

Question

In my ASP.NET application, I was trying to add few white spaces between two text boxes by typing space bar. The equivalent HTML source was   instead of  . So I just wanted to check: is this the new replacement for white space? If yes, any idea why they changed?

Answer 1

  is the character entity reference.   is the numeric entity reference. They are the same except for the fact that the latter does not need another lookup table to find its actual value.

Answer 2

Those do both mean non-breaking space, yes.   is another synonym, in hex.