Accents are, in the eyes of native English speakers, an incomprehensible orthographic extravaganza. English orthography is like English food: simple and dull yet fit for its purpose, period.
In contrast to the easy English, the orthographic punctuation of European languages, full of funny characters like ü for German or ñ in Spanish seems too elaborate and, just like everything continental, vaguely suspicious.
Take for instance this piece of text from the French anthem:
| Que veut cette horde d’esclaves, | |
| De traîtres, de rois conjurés ? | |
| Pour qui ces ignobles entraves | |
| Ces fers dès longtemps préparés ? (bis) | |
| Français, pour nous, ah! quel outrage |
| What does this horde of slaves, |
| Of traitors and conspiring kings want? |
| For whom these vile chains |
| These long-prepared irons? (repeat) |
| Frenchmen, for us, ah! What an insult |
That’s right, outrageus, all those î, é, è and ç, what’s the deal? All those characters come at a price. On Internet it is much harder to keep using those special character. Examples of poor orthography abound, take a French Annuarie: Gartoo.com, for instance, they need to fix their accents.
So when writing accents, I usually check a quick reference table of special html characters: the acute accent (´) is written as ´ in HTML code and ´ in character code.
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