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       Published on : 2026-05-07 09:29
       
 (DIR)  ASCII Chessboard, No HTML Required
       
 (HTM) Discussion on BBS [2]
       
       After the discussion on BBS [2], I felt this post was necessary.
       
       The word "ASCII" is used because most people associate any 
       text-based art with ASCII art - this is why I chose "ASCII 
       Chessboard, No HTML Required" as the title of the post [1].
       
       But the chess pieces themselves are Unicode symbols and the board 
       is made from symbols from the Unicode Box Drawing subset.
       
       What is ASCII
       ‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾
       ASCII is a very small character set from the 1960s. It contains 
       only 128 characters:
       
        * uppercase letters A-Z
        * lowercase letters a-z
        * digits 0-9
        * punctuation and symbols
        * control characters (these are not displayed - they tell a 
       computer or terminal to do something like: \n  newline, \t  tab, 
       \r  carriage return, \b  backspace)
       
       A real ASCII chessboard would look like:
       ‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾
           r n b q k b n r
           p p p p p p p p
           . . . . . . . .
           . . . . . . . .
           . . . . . . . .
           . . . . . . . .
           P P P P P P P P
           R N B Q K B N R
       
       What is UNICODE
       ‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾
       Unicode is a universal character encoding standard. Its goal is 
       to give every character from every writing system a unique number, 
       so computers can display and exchange text consistently. 
       It includes:
       
        * accented letters
        * greek letters
        * cyrillic letters
        * arabic letters
        * chinese, japanese and korean symbols
        * mathematical symbols
        * emojis 😀
        * chess pieces ♔
        * thousands of other symbols
       
       Example UNICODE characters:
       ‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾
        * A = Unicode U+0041
        * ♔ = Unicode U+2654
        * 😀 = Unicode U+1F600
       
       An important detail:
       ‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾
       ASCII is actually part of Unicode. The first 128 Unicode code 
       points are the original ASCII characters for compatibility. So:
       
        * all ASCII text is valid Unicode
        * but not all Unicode text is ASCII
       
       I published this post because I wanted to explain why I chose 
       ASCII: because "ASCII art" is the term used for any text visual 
       output on the modern internet!
       
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