long as appropriate fonts are present in the operating system. Older browsers, such as Netscape Navigator 4.77 and Internet Explorer 6, can only display text supported by the current font associated with the character encoding of the page, and may misinterpret numeric character references as being references to code values within the current character encoding, rather than references to Unicode code points. When you are using such a browser, it is unlikely that your computer has all of those fonts, or that the browser can use all available fonts on the same page. As a result, the browser will not display the text in the examples above correctly, though it may display a subset of them. Because they are encoded according to the standard, though, they will display correctly on any system that is compliant and does have the characters available. Further, those characters given names for use in named entity references are likely to be more commonly available than others. For displaying characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, such as the Gothic letter faihu, which is a variant of the runic letter fehu in the table above, some systems (like Windows 2000) need manual adjustments of their settings. Frequency of usage According to internal data from Google's web index, in December 2007 the UTF-8 Unicode encoding became the most frequently used encoding on web pages, overtaking both ASCII (US) and 8859-1/1252 (Western European). See also Help file for using special characters on Wikipedia Character encodings in HTML Charset detection Unicode character reference (wikibooks) References External links Unicode in XML and other Markup Languages - a W3C & Unicode Consortium joint publication that describes issues and provides guidelines relating to Unicode in markup languages Latin-1, "Special", and Mathematical, Greek and Symbolic named character entity definitions for HTML 4.01 UnicodeMap.org - Browse Unicode characters, ranges, and other information SIL's freeware fonts, editors and documentation Alan Wood’s Unicode Resources - Unicode fonts and information. http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/ipa-unicode.htm The International Phonetic Alphabet in Unicode http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/cjk_compatibility_ideographs.html CJK Compatibility Ideographs http://www.unicode.org/charts/ Unicode character charts; hexadecimal numbers only; PDF files showing all characters independent of browser capabilities Table of Unicode characters from 1 to 65535 - shows how they look in one's browser Web tool that converts "special" characters (such as Chinese characters) to Unicode numeric character references Multi-lingual web pages and Unicode - how to fix display problems w3.org via web.archive.org - Original HTML5 Citation Reference saved