Roman Nosov wrote:
I'm totally agree with Timwi – proper Unicode support is a requirement not a feature. However can someone tell me why PHP comes with no appropriate out-of-box support for such vital feature in 21 century?
Well, you see, that (the fact that PHP misses out on the most basic vital features, not just Unicode specifically) is kind of why no sensible 21st-century programmer would ever recommend PHP to start writing something new, and why the only people who choose or even recommend PHP are amateurs. Now obviously we are "stuck" with MediaWiki written in PHP, so we have to use it and live with its severe shortcomings...
For example look no further than Wikipedia's current diff engine.
You have mentioned some properties of the current diff engine, but I'm afraid I don't see how any of them are in any way a problem or an issue.
Timwi