Neither on SE nor here I could find a mention of dead keys. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_key I can't claim I know

Neither on SE nor here I could find a mention of dead keys. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_key I can't claim I know how they relate exactly to the accented characters being encoded in character sets but they seem to be at least historically an influence. Pressing a dead key which doesn't advance the cursor and then overwrite the basic character over it is certainly faster than using backspace (also cheaper if you think about character pricing). That the ECMA specs only talk about using BACKSPACE is surprising. At least those OS I used only supported the dead key approach but of course that was decades after the specs were written.