Hello,
I live in Aotearoa New Zealand, where one of the official languages is te reo Māori, and its use is widely incorporated into society. Māori crucially uses macrons (tohutō) in its language, with each of the vowels having tohutō variants (ā, ē, ī, ō, ū).
It is quite often to see instances of websites having the ability to use macrons in their URLs within NZ, as well as internationally seeing quite a number of sites that support other forms of extended Latin characters in their URLs.
Ghost is a really crucial open-source software that allows for blogging, reporting, and everything in-between. Particularly in the modern world, accurate communication online is really important. While this may seem nitpicky as it is largely confined to the URL for posts, it’d be really important to see support from Ghost for an extended set of Latin characters in URLs to really affirm that need for accurate communication.
In essence, this suggestion effectively recommending support for non-ASCII Unicode characters in URLs, such as letters with macrons (tohutō) and other forms of diacritics that are used globally (i.e., the French cedilla ç).
To underscore the importance of accurate communication, it is not uncommon for people to look at the URLs before clicking on something if they can do so easily, a large amount of news sites use descriptive URLs that contain the title of the article for a mix of SEO, user readability, and user trust reasons. As is the core reason for this suggestion, Ghost also does so, but without support for these characters.
An example of how much these characters can change something in Māori:
- kākā is the name for a native bird in NZ, but kaka informally means excrement/faeces.
- tāngata is the plural for people, tangata is the singular.
- tūkino refers to abuse or mistreatment, but tukino is the name of a ski field.
- tītī means mutton bird (noun) or to make a high-pitched sound/squeak (verb), but titi can refer to a specific human body part.
Examples are lengthy, and similar issues likely apply to a number of other languages that use these or similar characters.