As for a special notation for accented characters, I'm not fond of the idea. Foreign users should have foreign keyboards.
Of course that's not the problem.
Others should still be able to enter accents by whatever means their OS and browser allow, and I'm not aware of any that don't have some feature for it.
I don't know which feature you mean. Some foreign contributors use html entities for umlauts, others type ae for ä, oe for ö and ue fur ü. The first one makes the EditBox look ugly, and Links with entities in them don't work, and the second one has to be corrected by someone. At the moment it's not a big deal, just annoying. But I think it could be easily automated, if entities would automaticaly be turned into umlauts when the text is saved. An easier way of entering umlauts, like "o, would make foreign contributors even happier, but that should be standardized then in all wikipedias that use umlauts, accents, etc.
Could someone please configure this mailinglist the same way as wikipedia-l, so that replies go to the list?
Kurt