UTF-8 BOM & CSS

I was looking at
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-yergeau-rfc2279bis-05.txt

for other reasons, and still thinking about our GEO discussion of the BOM
today.

It says:

o  A protocol SHOULD also forbid use of U+FEFF as a signature for
      those textual protocol elements for which the protocol provides
      character encoding identification mechanisms, when it is expected
      that implementations of the protocol will be in a position to
      always use the mechanisms properly.  This will be the case when
      the protocol elements are maintained tightly under the control of
      the implementation from the time of their creation to the time of
      their (properly labeled) transmission.


To me, this says that since CSS has @charset as an encoding identification
mechanism, and since that mechanism is adequate (except for encodings that are
not ASCII compatible), that CSS SHOULD forbid the BOM when encoded in UTF-8.

I realize it is a SHOULD not a MUST, but it also strikes me as cleaner policy
to have fewer ways to do the same thing, and Notepad not withstanding, this
should be our recommendation for UTF-8.

Tex

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------
Tex Texin   cell: +1 781 789 1898   mailto:Tex@XenCraft.com
Xen Master                          http://www.i18nGuy.com
                         
XenCraft		            http://www.XenCraft.com
Making e-Business Work Around the World
-------------------------------------------------------------

Received on Wednesday, 22 October 2003 21:54:32 UTC