Nope. UTF-8 doesn't need special support. If you treat an UTF-8 encoded text as a string of single-byte chars and display it that way, you get good ol' ASCII text with funny characters here and there where UTF-8 encoded ideograms or unicode characters are meant to appear - the string can still be treated as an ordinary array of chars, tho. As a result of the lack of this feauture, the user would be unable to search the AniDB for titles that contain unicode characters, but that's about it.exp wrote:The big problem here is that UTF8 would have to be supported by every anidb related software.
An application that does support UTF-8 encoded text would parse the text into a string of double-byte unicode characters and display them as such.
Using UTF-8 doesn't hurt compatibility or features. If an application, be it the CGI, Chii or some client program, doesn't support the special encoding, anime titles using kanji will look weird, but the application is still fully useable.