This came about from a discussion on one of the betas - but it affects the main engine and my understanding is that such requests should be posted here.
Initially it was simply about supporting diacritics in the tagging system, and subsequently turned into a bit of a debate; a quick summary is as follows:
A: The tagging system is broken because it just silently drops characters with diacritics.
B: Tag diacritics are a usability nightmare because the majority of users can't type them.
A: The site can't possibly hope to attract an international audience by being so English-centric.
B: We obviously don't want to lose the international audience, but most users are from North America and we can't just throw usability out the window for them.
This went on for several more rounds and I don't wish to bore everyone with the details, but clearly both sides of this argument are valid:
When trying to attract an expert audience, if a word (such as the name of a food) is legitimately non-English and cannot be written correctly without diacritics, it sends a negative message to non-Americans.
On the other hand, I have no idea how to type an Ă without looking it up in the character map, and I'm certain the same can be said for 98% of the other users (especially keeping in mind not all languages share the same diacritics).
Blah blah blah, get to the point already...
Eventually it hit me that we actually have a solution for this, that being the newly-implemented tag synonyms feature. This allows us to:
Use the "correct" tag, diacritics and all, if and when the software supports it, and
Avoid all the associated usability headaches because English-speaking users would simply be able to type the anglicized tag - not just in searches but also when tagging their questions, which is extremely important for newbies.
Everybody wins, except the taggers and moderators, because maintaining all the synonyms would be a nightmare - especially once the site is out of beta and you need a bunch of upvotes to create tag synonyms (which of course you don't have, because the tag was just created!)
So my request is twofold:
Update the tag system to support Unicode characters.
Implement a feature whereby, whenever a new tag with diacritics is created, the system automatically adds an "English" (ASCII-encodable) tag synonym.
This gives everybody what they want, and frees users from actually having to worry about any of this nonsense. International users can tag the way they want, and North American users can live on in blissful ignorance, and worry about answering questions instead of fumbling with alt-codes.
You might say that these should be requested as two separate feature requests. But I happen to believe that they need to be implemented together, because if the former is implemented without the latter, the tags on certain sites could easily become an unholy mess in no time flat. That is why I've lumped them together this way.
Feature #2 might not be appropriate on every SE site (particularly the proposed foreign-language sites, like the Persian IT), but the more Stack Exchange branches out into non-technical areas, the more important this is going to become. Cooking is obviously full of these issues due to the vast number of "ethnic" foods, but I could easily see this having applications on sites like Mathematics, Physics, English/French Translation, Books, Japanese, and so on. It remains to be seen which, if any, of these proposals actually get off the ground, but if they do, the ability to support Unicode tags and/or automatic culture-synonyms would be a major benefit.
büchi-automataon Computer Science.