Some browsers do not recognise certain symbols and letters, especially if they are written in a language other than english. If you do not have true-type fonts installed then the characters may not show up correctly on your visitors browser.

To overcome this, special ISO value characters have been developed so that all browsers, with or without these fonts installed, will display the correct characters. Sounds a bit complicated, but let's take an example. If you were to type a French word like Francais and you do not have a keyboard with access to French speach accents on them, then the word is not correctly written to a French person, it should look like this: Français - see the difference?

All I have done is written part of the word, in this case the first four letters (Fran...), added the ISO code ç (ç), then simply completed the word (...ais). This then gives me what you have read, Français.

Straight forward? I hope so! If you are writing pages for non-English speaking visitors (which you should be if you want to be international), then this set of characters is vital. You can write entire pages of script using ISO characters and I can prove it! The following lines of Russian are written entirely from ISO characters!

.... был основан в начале 2000 года. Официальной датой открытия считается апрель 2000 года. Мы разрабатывали сайт с учетом таких критериев, как

The fact that you are able to view this text possibly without having cryllic (Russian) fonts installed proves it works! The above is taken from a website I developed that required the 'About Us' pages to be written in several languages, including Russian, Bulgarian, French, Italian, German, Japanese and Polish! Yes, it took ages to complete but you could say I learned a lot about the ISO character set!

So all you have to do is type the ISO code in your script in either format - for another example, to get Æ you can either type Æ or Æ - the choice is yours.

More Information
There's a wealth of information available on the net concerning the writing of HTML as well as the printed word (remember books?). Talking of which, a book I can recommend is 'Instant HTML' by Alex Homer, Chris Ullman & Steve Wright published by Wrox Press Ltd (ISBN 1-861001-56-8).

On the Internet, you can access basic HTML information at Concept Corporation, where they also have some free sets of buttons and things for you to download too. Another excellent online source for the clever stuff is the HTML Clinic.