1) The standard DW Connection doesn't allow you to set the character set used for the connection. This can cause UTF - 8 characters to become munged during transmission from the form to the database. the default connection character set is the iso-8859-1 character set.
doesn't matter what the database character set is if the connection is transmitting to and from the database using the iso-8859-1 character set.
2) It's not so much about optimized for HTML Editor, as it for the language characters you will be using.
changing the character set cant correct problems that already exist, but it should prevent them from being inserted in the future.