Not Graessl, not GrÅÅl, not Gr伍陸l, just Gräßl. Yes, my name includes Umlauts. Many Web Services and Applications can’t handle them right. They replace it by characters you don’t even know they exist or force you to write your name wrong (without Umlauts). This is a serious problem, because there are more people that have Umlauts and other unusual characters for your region in theire name. I also experienced problems with Flash-based Applications. I saw sites playing nice with these characters on one page and destroying my name on the other, bacause they tell the browser the wrong encoding. Some webservices don’t even let you signup, because they count it as an validation error.

There is UTF-8 that can handle these characters very well, please use it!