Proposed addition to Display problems caused by the UTF-8 BOM

Chaps,

I propose to add the following paragraph to http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-utf8-bom in the section By the Way:

"Applications that look at the text to work out the character encoding can tell straight away that the text is encoded in UTF-8 if they find a BOM at the beginning.  This can save time if the only non-ASCII characters occur a long way down the file (such as a copyright symbol in text at the very end).  Web pages, however, ought to declare the character encoding explicitly at the top of the file or in the HTTP header, so a BOM should not be necessary."

Unless I hear any objections, I will make the change, unannounced, in a couple of days time.

Cheers,
RI


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Richard Ishida
Internationalization Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
 
http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/
http://www.w3.org/International/
http://people.w3.org/rishida/blog/
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Received on Wednesday, 25 July 2007 11:45:37 UTC