When you type regular letters, numbers, and characters from your keyboard into the body of an HTML document, they show up on your Web pages just as you typed them. But things aren’t so easy in non-English speaking countries (and such places do exist – honest). Languages such as French, German, and Icelandic often use characters that are not found on your typical keyboard. Even in English, accents can distinguish a “résumé” from a “resume.”

So how do you make special characters and accented letters show up on your pages? You use a special set of codes called character entities, which you insert into your HTML code and which your browser will display as the corresponding symbols or characters you want.

Childhood, as far as your basic cheese selections go, was easy. In your typical middle-class family, you had one of three choices:cheddar, Monterey Jack, and those precious, flat, sandwich-sized slices of American. That’s what all the cool kids ate. I had to fight my mother to get those into my lunch. She used to make sandwiches with these huge slabs of cheddar cheese that looked like they were hewed from the side of an orange glacier. Although I lost the Wonder Bread battle, I didn’t give an inch on this one. For some reason, Mom couldn’t see the simple beauty in a perfectly proportioned square of processed cheese food.

The problem with childhood is that we never appreciate it while we have the chance. As I grew up, I developed more mature needs and tastes. Like many young adults lost in the hype of ’80s mass cultural wonders like Molly Ringwald and Oingo Boingo, I began to experiment. I told myself that I didn’t have a problem, but a little brie here, and a bit of Chaumont there, and before I knew it, I was hooked.