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?
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html
asp.net
visual-studio-2008
character-encoding
is the character entity reference (meant to be easily parseable by humans).  is the numeric entity reference (meant to be easily parseable by machines).They are the same except for the fact that the latter does not need another lookup table to find its actual value. The lookup table is called a DTD, by the way.
You can read more about character entity references in the offical W3C documents.
  is the numeric reference for the entity reference — they are the exact same thing. It's likely your editor is simply inserting the numberic reference instead of the named one.
See the Wikipedia page for the non-breaking space.
Those do both mean non-breaking space, yes.   is another synonym, in hex.
Source: Stackoverflow.com