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If you want to use special characters like umlauts or arrows or smileys you have to put them into your
text as unicode characters. My name actually looks like this: Jürgen Haug. In the text I have to
put the ü either like this: ü (that's the name for that special character, a lot of the
unicode characters have names, which are easier to remember, like é and & (é, &), or I can write
ü which is the number of the ü in the Unicode Table.
If you set up everything correctly, including the right character set encoding, you will not have to
use those special character IDs for normal Umlauts, it will work anyway. But it's always good to know about it, and it's
still necessary to use characters that you can't type with your keyboard :-)
In the Unicode Table are around 50000 characters encoded, not all can be displayed in current browsers, and certainly it also depends on the font used. But with present up-to-date (hint hint) browsers there shouldn't be too many characters that are not shown. You can use smileys, block graphics, or some very exotic looking characters from foreign alphabets as ornamentation in your web design.
There is a site on the web, that shows nicely those Unicode characters that have names attached to them (like the eacute or amp) and I also can point you to a really good site that has the complete list of Unicode characters.
