Massively useful, and clearly the
right thing for dealing with those messy
foreign languages without resorting to the unspeakable ugliness of 8-bit
ASCII, that which forces you to choose between having curly brackets
or accented vowels, and therefore screws royally Italian
C programmers (and French C programmers and ...).
Unfortunately, no web browser implements the full set, and all I can do is say things like † and hope that the right character (actually glyph: you never see characters, only glyphs) appear on my screen.
What your browser thinks about †: --->
†<--- (on Internet Explorer 6.0, with a full moon and my nose perfectly clean, I get a little Christian cross).