Item 2. Mark Up with ASCII if Possible

Despite the rapid growth of Unicode in the last few years, the sad fact is that many text editors and other tools are still tied to platform- and nationality-dependent character sets such as Windows-1252, MacRoman, and SJIS. The only characters all these sets have in common are the 128 ASCII letters, digits, punctuation marks, and control characters. These characters are the only ones that can be reliably displayed and edited across the wide range of computers and software in use today. Thus, if it's not too big a problem, try to limit your markup to the ASCII character set. If you're writing in English, this is normally not a problem.

On the other hand, this principle is not written in stone, especially ...

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