[Bug 12950] Require Byte-Order Mark (BOM) in UTF-8 encoded pages

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=12950

--- Comment #4 from Leif Halvard Silli <xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no> 2011-06-15 23:42:22 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #3)

> Arguably they're worse in most cases, because they're 
> harder for authors to deal with and debug.

Does this mean that you disagree with HTML5 when it states that tools should
default to UTF-8 ?

]] Authoring tools should default to using UTF-8 for newly-created documents.
[RFC3629] [[
   http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/semantics.html#charset

My expectation is that tools *will* default to UTF-8 and that authors will then
*use* UTF-8 - they will not often change to legacy encodings.

Why do you eventually expect that authors will change the encoding to a legacy
encoding very often, after the default? And why do you eventually expect that
the tool will not handle the conversion from UTF-8 with BOM to legacy encoding?
 And why do you expect that authors will not combine META charset and BOM? Why
do you not think that those that omit the META because there is a BOM will know
what they are doing?

>From my angle, the UTF-8 BOM would make it *simpler* to debug instances where
the HTTP charset differ from the encoding of the DOCUMENT, because:

 * There is less reason to debug, beecause the page will less often fail,
w.r.t. encoding.

 * If the UA permits the encoding of a page with UTF-8 BOM to be changed in the
first place (by user or by HTTP), then it will become a teachable moment, as
this will also simultaneously bring the page in Quirks-Mode. 
    (Only Firefox (for HTTP) and Opera (for HTTP annd file://) do not permit
this, however, and I doubt that more UAs will start to permit the BOM to be
overridden, because they would then land in quirks-mode as well as render the
page illegible.)

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Received on Wednesday, 15 June 2011 23:42:33 UTC