With regard to special characters--I'm in the process of updating the Wiki pages related to ASCII, extended characters, and *ML character entity references, so in a few days you'll have all the information you never wanted to know about character sets. The current Wiki ASCII codes page will be entirely replaced--the characters on that page don't even correspond to the codes that label them--perhaps Wiki software munged them at some point.
At any rate, after these pages are done, I'll make some recommendations about how Wiki should handle special characters, and you'll have the information you need to evaluate them or offer aternative suggestions. I should have that done next week.
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