HTML Entity Encoding in JavaScript: A Practical Guide with Real Examples
If you've ever seen & or < on a webpage and wondered what they mean, or had your site vulnerable to XSS because of unescaped user input — this guide is for you. HTML entity encoding is one of those fundamentals that separates developers who know security basics from those who don't. Let's break it down. HTML entities are a way to represent special characters in HTML documents. Some characters have special meaning in HTML — like > Greater-than, tag delimiter & & Ampersand, entity de
🎯 Vulnerability: Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
💡 Defense Fix: Enforce Context-Aware Output Encoding, strict Content-Security-Policy (CSP), and HttpOnly cookie flags.