Jaap van Ganswijk wrote:
Perhaps the Wikipedia software could try to translate ae and such to the appropriate HTML abreviations like ä but that would be risky, because it would have to know in what language each word was written. In Dutch we have the 'oe' as a valid combination which is not equal to 'ö', so if Dutch and German were mixed in an article it would cause problems.
To do this the system also needs to distinguish between an umlaut and a diaresis. The famous painter Raphael is often spelled with a diaresis as "Raphaël". It wouldn't do do have him automagically turned into "Raphäl". The important thing to me is not in having the machines put in umlauts or other accents, but having the search engine regard spellings with or without accents as equivalent. This would be a great help for the searcher who doesn't know if a word has an accent or exactly what accent it has. No non-french speaking person should be required to know about how some verbs change their accent patterns, or the subtleties about an acute or grave accent on a final "e" in Catalan. The uniquely German treatment of umlauted vowels can then probably be treated with redirects.
Someone also made a comment an anglo-centric comment about foreign users using foreign keyboards. What does this mean if I write in more than one language? Maybe I should connect a separate keyboard for each language. The computer should be smart enough to know that it does things differntly when I'm on my Russian or Turkish or Devanagiri keyboard. [;-)] .
Eclecticology
PS: At first I thought that I was replying to the list but apparently it only went to Jaap. I suppose I'll should use the reply all when answering to the list. -Ec