[[HTML]] has been in use since [[1991]] (note that the [[w3cWorld Wide Web Consortium|W3C]] [[international standard]] is now [[XHTML]]), but the first standardized version with a reasonably complete treatment of international characters was version 4.0, not published until 1997. Considerable care must be exercised when creating HTML pages with special characters outside the range of 7-bit [[ASCII]] to ensure two goals: the integrity of the information stored in the HTML document, and proper display of the document by the largest possible variety of browsers.
