Some IE7 issues: BOM and www.w3.org

Dear all,

I have just been tearing hair out trying to trace a problem
with a web page that doesn't display property in IE+MathPlayer
but is fine in Firefox: turns out that my file was correctly
UTF-8 encoded and did NOT have the Byte Order Mark (EF BB BF)
at the beginning. It did have a proper XML declaration including a
correct definition of the encoding.  When I added a BOM my problems
all went away. Anyone know why?  BTW I just checked the server's
HTTP headers with the file, it does not specify any encoding
method anywhere, neither UTF-8 nor anything else.

Anyway, in case others have the same problem, I thought you might
like to know that this seems to be an issue. I did check the specs
and the BOM is NOT manditory for UTF-8, but it seems IE requires it.
Are there any potential problems with including a BOM in all my files?
In my case, that would include all ordinary HTML files encoded as
UTF-8 and served as text/html as well as XML data.

By the way, there's another embarrassment for someone, possibly
not unrelated:  it seems that IE7 (with or without MathPlayer)
fails to display http://www.w3.org/  At least that's what I
discovered. I cannot explain this one either.  I tried it
with my MathPlayer enabled IE7, and then uninstalled MathPlayer
(including removing the registry thing that changes the
content-negotiation behaviour and a system re-start) and got the
same display from IE7 at http://www.w3.org/ : just a listing of
the XML data, and no graphical display.  I don't remember IE6
doing the same.  I'd be interested to hear from others trying this
out in case it's a glitch with my set-up (e.g. some registry
setting that was set by some package or add-on).

Richard

Received on Saturday, 20 January 2007 08:24:36 UTC