[pxc]

I'm pretty sure © and ½ are in ASCII. I think é might be, too.

But anyway, I agree: there's no reason plain text shouldn't be rich.

[JdeBP]

Wherever you learned ASCII from, it was very wrong. It probably made the common (although less common in the 21st century than in the 20th) erroneous conflation of ASCII and Latin-1, or IBM code page 437, or IBM code page 850.

[pxc]

Oh! You're right. It was way back in high school, and I think I must have learned about Latin-1 under the guise of "ASCII".