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That might be, but accents are far from vestigial. They direct the speaker/reader to the proper pronounciation. I, too, speak English, French, and Spanish. In Spanish, imagine the different with an accent over the last "a" in "papa". With an accent, it's a familiar form of "father", without and accent, it's "potato". An important distinction. Also, it's useful for question words, to indicate, in writing, whether a question is being posed: cuándo versus cuando. One implies a question being asked, the other is just "when", to be used whenever you normally would. The same goes for French. Not only are they used for pronounciation, but they are a part of the word.
As far as 7-bit ASCII goes, it's a remnant from the beginnings of digital exchange. Languages that require 8-bits to properly work have come out with a work around, such as VISCII for Vietnamese text encoded in 7 bits. However, UTF-8 is very suitable for encoding, and out to be used. As far as for using it in a webpage, try using the entity é (not sure if that will show up, it ought to read &eacte; ... let's see which displays). But 7-bit ASCII is dead .. move along.
-- Rob
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