clude words with accents. And I should warn you that character handling is only a tiny portion of what it takes to create software that works internationally, but I can only write about one thing at a time so today it's character sets.</p>

<p><strong><font size="4">A Historical Perspective</font></strong></p>

<p>The easiest way to understand this stuff is to go chronologically.</p>

<p>You probably think I'm going to talk about very old character sets like EBCDIC here. Well, I won't. EBCDIC is not r