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&#212 shows up as a trademark symbol in Firefox?

<span style="font-family:Symbol; font-size:10pt; color:#000000">&#212;</span><span style="font-family:MS Sans Serif; font-size:10pt; color:#000000">

Above is the HTML code for the trademark symbol that a fellow developer created. Unfortunately, they used this character sequence &#212 to create a trademark symbol for the program name. I'm under the impression this character sequence will most likely produce this character: Ô.

However, the sequence
- Shows up correctly in Chrome as a TM.
- Shows up INCORRECTLY in Safari as this symbol: Ô
- Shows up INCORRECTLY in Firefox as this symbol: Ô

Why does this symbol show up correctly in Google Chrome compared to the other browsers? I assume this has to do with how each parses different character sequences, but I'm just confused as to why Chrome would have it show up correctly and ignore the usual character sequence symbol Ô.

Question: Is this the best character sequence to use for a trademark symbol for use in HTML pages? Or are there other more common trademark symbol character sequences used?

Thanks!

EDIT: Found DOCTYPE at the top of one of the HTML pages, not sure if it will make a different or not. 

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">
Solution

  • Use the HTML entity &trade; (in a normal font instead of Symbol). This maps to &#8482;, but the named entity is widely supported.

    Alternatively, use UTF-8 encoding for your HTML and embed the symbol directly, as suggested in the answers to this question.