HTML’s use of the ISO-latin-1 character set allows it to
display most accented characters on most platforms, but it has limitations. For
example, common characters such as bullets, Em dashes, and curly quotes simply
aren’t available in the ISO-latin-1 (if they’re absolutely necessary, you can
create images representing those characters and use them on your pages. I don’t
recommend that option, though, because it can interfere with the layout of your
page. Also, it can look off if the user’s browser is set to a nonstandard text
size.) also, many ISO-latin-1 characters might be entirely unavailable is some
browsers, depending on whether those characters exist on that platform and in
the current font.
HTML 4.01 takes things a huge leap further by proposing that
Unicode should be available as a character set for HTML documents. Unicode is a
standard character encoding system that, although backward-compatible with our
familiar ASCII encoding, offers the capability to encode characters in almost
any of the world’s languages, including Chinese and Japanese.
This means that
documents can be created easily in any language, and they also can contain
multiple languages. Both internet explorer and Netscape support Unicode, and it
can render documents in many of the explorer and Netscape support Unicode, and
it can render documents in many of the scripts provided by Unicode as long as
the necessary fonts are available.
This is an important step because Unicode is emerging as a
new de facto standard for character encoding, java uses Unicode as its default
character encoding, for example, and windows supports Unicode character
encoding.
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