I'm not sure I'm the right person to raise
this question but
I wondered what the current thinking is on adapting the code
for other character sets. If I recall correctly we or now
assuming UTF-8, right? What exactly does that mean, btw? That
we changed the MySQL character tables for those above 7F?
Anyting else?
The English Wikipedia, and the German one being tested now, are
both ISO-8859-1, not UTF-8. UTF-8 will be needed for Polish and
other languages. There won't be much software change involved;
just telling MySQL to index the right way.
As for a special notation for accented characters, I'm not fond
of the idea. Foreign users should have foreign keyboards. 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 like duplicating effort that should be
already done elsewhere.