Encoding (aka code pages)? No one gives a damn about encoding!
True enough. It’s so deeply geeky, it’s hard to imagine any normal person knowing the difference between CP1251 and KOI8-R, for instance. Windows had code pages coming out the wazoo. And then there was ASCII … Anyway, it was a big pain to some people.
Then along came UTF-8 (aka Unicode), and thing settled down nicely, especially on the web. It’s a universal character set that’s also backward compatible (unlike its cousins UTF-16 and UTF-32). It can render just about every language and tons of weird characters. Who could ask for anything more‽
See that? It’s a punctuation mark I used when I was in high school, only back then I made it by hand: a combination of a question mark and exclamation mark. On a typewriter (link supplied for those under 40), you could overtype the one on top of the other, or just type them sequentially—know what I mean?!
But with UTF-8, if you know the code (U+203D), you can insert it in all its unitary glory.
Not mention you can type in Russian (Не дай мне Бог сойти с ума …), Japanese (ぢ )*, Sanskrit (मा)—whatever.
Because this website uses UTF-8 for its base encoding, you should be able to see all that stuff. If you can’t, maybe you need to get your computer world-compatible.
Let’s say it big so we can see it better:
Is that cool or what‽
__________
*Since I have no idea what I’m saying, I’d better restrict myself to a single character.
