You can use Unicode characters in item descriptions, so you can write these texts in Japanese, Finnish, or Greek. Only the “syntactical elements” (like checkboxes, priority, due dates) are made up from ASCII characters, to ensure that they are easy to type.
Perhaps the spec could allow an implementation to support a run-time option to recognize alternate characters for syntactic elements. This would have the downside that one person's data might not be shareable with another person's [x]it installation. But that's not necessarily a bug, especially to people who don't plan to share their todo lists.
This run-time-option-only approach would be much better than the "be liberal in what you accept and strict in what you emit" philosophy that tends to cause fragmentation on lots of different levels.
> Perhaps the spec could allow an implementation to support a run-time option to recognize alternate characters for syntactic elements.
Please don't. The equivalent in programming languages would be localizing the syntactic elements ({}, (), [], '.', etc). Its much simpler for a language ecosystem to have the same syntax regardless of the programmer's language.
As far as I know, international keyboards can still type these characters just fine.
You can use Unicode characters in item descriptions, so you can write these texts in Japanese, Finnish, or Greek. Only the “syntactical elements” (like checkboxes, priority, due dates) are made up from ASCII characters, to ensure that they are easy to type.