> > 	u_int16_t character;			/* character */

Pardon my ignorance, you will know better: is u_int16_t realy enough here?
I haven't followed all the multibyte encoding discussions lately, but ISTR
there have been strong objections against "only" using UNICODE.

While there are multiple ways a character can be encoded when getting on the
screen, this interface defines only one way to get it back (and can not do
variable length encodings) - so the returned value should be unique.

Martin