A way, within an SGML language such as HTML, of referencing a character using a simple string of numbers reflecting the position of the character in the current character set. For example, the character reference é is the reference for e with an acute accent (é) within the ISO Latin-1 character set. Note, however, that character reference will produce a different character if a different character set is involved. For a character-set independent representation, see entity reference. Chinese/Japanese/Korean, often used in the discussion of character sets and of the issues important to these language/character set groups.