Internet is an indirect exchange zone,
when you talk to someone or writing something, you can not express your
emotions because you are not in front of you. That is why we use
emoticons (or smiley). They may consist of a sequence of characters or
simply a picture or sequence of pictures (animated gif format).
ASCII art
ASCII
(American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a standard that
defines how characters should be coded on 7 bits. So there is only 128
characters total (95 viewable). You can find on the Internet that gives
you ASCII representation of 8 bits of a character (the eighth is still
0).
The ASCII art is to create shapes
and images with a number of characters limited. You can do this
directly or with software that converts your drawings. This gives rather
interesting results.
It is common in programs Review decorated by ASCII characters that create boundaries. It is a drift of ASCII art.
Thus,
systems that do not read images directly (as in Microsoft Windows
command prompt or MS-DOS and terminal on Mac or Linux) can still see
shapes that can embellish these tools.
Here is an example: What are ASCII art and emoticons
