According to tradition we Brits believe foreigners will understand us if we shout loud enough so by rights we should just TYPE IN CAPS to get Johnny Foreigner to understand us online. However it is all a bit more complex than that - just getting the ä’s & ë’s displayed (that’s accented characters if they don’t come out in your browser) can be a problem. I’m just getting my UI translated in Chinese - we have several European languages already but this is the first crack at a CJKV (Chinese, Japanese, Korean & Vietnamese if you’re not into the internationalisation jargon) so my mind is tuned to these things at the moment.I found a really nice intro here http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html so I won’t try and explain the basics - I think he’s done it better than I can. However I can improve on his opening comments about not having to go as far into history as EBCDIC - I use EBCDIC all the time but then I do do legacy systems!

If your interested, EBCDIC maps all the printable characterss into code points 0×40 to 0xFF and which code page you select will change what glyphs are displayed for any given code point. The most obvious for us Europeans being 9F which display as ¤ (international currency symbol) on code page 285 or € (euro) on 1147 etc. The easiest code points to remember are 0xF0 - 0xF9 which nearly always map to ‘1′ - ‘9′ (0×30 - 0×39 in ASCII). The only encoding for CJKV in EBCDIC is to use DBCS (double byte character sets) where each character takes up 16 bits.

So now you now you know!