utf-8 or other unicode support

[ke.han]

Hello,
Its my understanding that erlang strings are not utf-8 or otherwise 
unicode.
I need to develop a web application to support Latin and Asian languages.

For HTML pages, I"m assuming I can just code them in the proper language 
and yaws will handle things (This is a big assumption and I would like 
feedback on this).

What about handling data in mnesia or dets?
In years past when a DB did not support utf-8, but my Java strings were 
utf-8, I could encode them to binary for storage.  Unfortunately, this 
diminishes query ability.  In addition, since most of app data was in 
Latin characters, I had to encode/decode fields just in case which added 
lots of unnecessary overhead.

What have others done?
thanks, ke han