When one creates web content in languages different than English the problem of search engine optimized and user friendly URLs emerge.
I’m wondering whether it is the best practice to use de-accented letters in URLs — risking that some words have completely different meanings with and without certain accents — or it is better to stick to the usage of non-english characters where appropriate sacrificing the readability of those URLs in less advanced environments (e.g. MSIE, view source).
“Exotic” letters could appear anywhere: in titles of documents, in tags, in user names, etc, so they’re not always under the complete supervision of the maintainer of the website.
A possible approach of course would be setting up alternate — unaccented — URLs as well which would point to the original destination, but I would like to learn your opinions about using accented URLs as primary document identifiers.
When faced with a similar problem, I took advantage of URL rewriting to allow such pages to be accessible by either the accented or unaccented character. The actual URL would be something like
And a rewriting+character translating function allows this reference
to load the same resource. So to answer your question, as the primary resource identifier, I confine myself to 0-9, A-Z, a-z and the occasional hyphen.