Understanding HTML Escape Characters in a Simple Way
HTML documents display certain characters such as the angle brackets < and the greater than sign > as well as the ampersand & differently from how they appear in the written content. HTML gives special significance to these characters which function as part of its language. The less than symbol < serves as a tag definition marker <p> while ampersand & functions as an initial reference for entity characters such as &nbsp;. These characters are likely to create confusion for browsers when directly placed into content since they can be interpreted as part of the HTML structure rather than displayed as basic text.

To ensure proper character display on the webpage users need a specific approach. The display of characters in web applications depends on HTML escape characters due to their dual usage in HTML. Specific codes function as HTML escape characters to display characters which browsers might misunderstand as HTML syntactical elements.