Wen Huang has made a quick post to his blog about some of the comments Andrei Zmievski about the future of PHP, specifically on internationalization and UTF-8's place in it.
I attended the SF PHP Meetup last night where Andrei Zmievski (PHP 6 release manager and PHP core team member) gave a talk on PHP 6 and internationalization (i18n). [...] It was evident that Andrei and team have given quite a bit of thought into what i18n means for the PHP world, and as a result, PHP developers everywhere will soon be enjoying a new set of tools to enable faster development of multi-lingual sites.
He also mentions the back-port that several of these features will get into the upcoming PHP 5.3 release (along with the much-hyped namespace support). You can check out Andrei's talk on his website.