Conversion of special characters to entities

[Lasar Liepins]

Hello.

Apparently MarkDown does not convert special characters that possess
HTML entity equivalents. Examples are German Umlauts (ä becomes ä
etc), which often come up in my documents, with me being German and all
that. Of course I can do this with an additional script after or before
running MarkDown over my documents, but since for example the ampersand
is converted to &, I was wondering why such characters are not
replaced by their respective entities.

I am a little weak on the specifications of any W3C or other standard
regarding this issue. I guess it's because such umlauts a) don't come up
all that much if you're writing in English and b) they usually work fine
without using entities, as long as the text encoding stays intact.
However I do run into the problem that text encoding is broken at some
point, when transferring text files between different operating systems,
applications or maybe being put into a MySQL database. It's not a rule,
but it's something that happens. Plus I can't always be sure what a web
site visitor's web browser thinks it sees, so entities are the safer bet
for me.

So is this something that would make sense to be built into MarkDown, or
is there a good reason to not do it?

Thanks,

_Lasar

-- 
_Lasar Liepins                     0: http://liepins.net/
  lasar at liepins.de                  1: http://liepins.de/
                                    n: http://w42.de/
Nur was nicht ist, ist möglich. (Einstuerzende Neubauten)