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