Perhaps the real problem here is that, conceptually, o-umlaut (say) is not really a separate character from "o". Rather, it is an "o" plus an accent. Typographi

Perhaps the real problem here is that, conceptually, o-umlaut (say) is not really a separate character from "o". Rather, it is an "o" plus an accent. Typographically, this is obvious; how to store o-umlaut in a text data structure is not so obvious. Unicode takes the view that it is a separate character, and perhaps this is the wrong view. Putting it a different way: the problem isn't that diacritic marks are bad, nor is it a clash of cultures. The problem is that the Unicode standard does not match up well with the way people actually use character strings.