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its like when your talking with someone on facebook. you are on your PC/laptop and the person is on mobile. when the send a emoticon to you, its only visible to you if you are also on a mobile. it just shows up as boxes to PC/laptop users. same with when you use a program that allows you to type chinese. I have "Sugou Pinyin" and you can't see the chinese characters unless you have a chinese oriented browser. its kinda dumb, but i hope someone can invent a browser that allows you to see EVERYTHING

Information is sent over the internet in The HyperText Markup Language.(HTML) Hypertext software interprets this language to display it with a web browser. Often these symbols mean that something is being sent such as text in a foreign language that uses a different alphabet that your browser cannot interpret.