What characters can come immediately after the < in a tag?

Question

On a webpage I found a tag that begins with a Unicode letter 休

Is there a list somewhere of the letters and symbols may validly follow right after the less than sign?

The answer here is pretty good https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7065693/is-the-at-sign-a-valid-html-xml-tag-character/7066512#7066512 — Rob Kwasowski, Feb 05 '19 at 06:18

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 05 '19 at 06:22

They're not using a mark-up less than sign "<" on their site but rather they are using the HTML entity less than < to display the reserved character as text rather than HTML.

This can be treated just like ordinary text. So in essence, it's not a tag, its just ordinary text.

For instance the line:

<font style="color:#F00;"><休闲文化></font>

Actually is:

<font style="color:#F00;">&lt;休闲文化&gt;</font>

Thus, <休闲文化> isn't a tag itself, but rather just text (which uses HTML reserved characters within it - perhaps marking you confuse it for a tag)

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 05 '19 at 06:26

In which context is it used? XML, HTML,...? In case of HTML there are tags already defined, you can't use a random one. In XML you can define you're own tags. In both cases you might use random tags, while not ending up with error you would notice, the tag might just get skipped. I believe this Wiki page might help you: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_and_HTML_character_entity_references

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 05 '19 at 14:52

All characters you want (but you should quote few).

As you notice, the character <休 come in <a href="http:(...)" target="_blank" title="<休闲文化>【成都大熊猫基. So this is inside a string (an attribute value). The < in this case will not indicate a start of a tag.

What characters can come immediately after the < in a tag?

3 Answers3