XML/HTML special character codes

Question

Is there an official name for the character codes, the codes that represent & as & in order to differentiate between the text character and the coding use of it, used in XML and HTML content?

Also, are these part of the XML or HTML standard, or a third party standard? And, is there an official site you can point me to about them?

Answer 1

They are called character entity references and defined with slightly varying details(only relevant for exotic ones) in XML, SGML and HTML.

Wikipedia has a nice overview, whereas the W3C provides the complete list.

Answer 2

Character entity references

a number of these are defined in the HTML standard linked above

Answer 3

XHTML Character Entity Reference

HTML Entities