On Thu, 17 Nov 2005 17:15:32 -0000, "Peter Taylor"
wrote:

Not that I fully understand this, but I think these Alt-xxx characters are
indeed part of the basic ASCII set.

There are no "Alt -XX" characters, they're just characters. I use
Alt-092 regularly for "\", just because this oddball Eunuchs keyboard
doesn't have a key that every Windows box needs.

For characters up to "¦" (Alt-127) then they're 7-bit ASCII characters
and you'll find them on most keyboards. Other characters «© ½° é» etc.
are 8-bit and are found in ANSI but not ASCII character sets. They'll
work in almost all Usenet contexts (I don't think this is a
_requirement_ for usenet, but in practice it's widely supported).

Other character sets (UTF-8, ISO-8859-1 etc) that are different from
ANSI will probably not work on usenet (there will be odd "broken"
characters). They should work on the web if the server headers are
configured correctly. Some (UTF-16) won't work for usenet at all.