Extended character coding

• An extended character set has been defined to include the most common characters used in roman alphabets for other European languages, including diacritic accents, for instance:

  & & & ampersand

  ç ç ç c cedilla

  é é é e acute

• Some characters have special functions in text representation languages (e.g. < and > as delimiters for HTML tags).

  Different languages, such as HTML, LaTeX, C, Basic, ... use different characters for such purposes; the metasyntax of these languages is not standardised.

  In order to display these special characters, they must be CODED, and NOT represented by themselves.

• The extended ASCII concept has been replaced by UNICODE encoding, which covers pretty well all known alphabets of the world, including the IPA with complex diacritic composition.

  Not much software supports it so far, though the newest generations of hypertext browser and text processor apparently do so, though not yet fully.