Re: BOM and the W3C Internationalization Checker

It was the i18n checker that prompted me to consider revising the 
article. First I want to settle the article, then I'll make the changes 
to the checker.

RI



Richard Ishida
Internationalization Activity Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)

http://www.w3.org/International/
http://rishida.net/

On 22/11/2012 03:16, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
> The W3C Internationalization Checker’s[1] attitude towards the BOM is
> very questionable:
>
> * If a page does not include a BOM (and there is no other issues
>    either), then it reports "No issues to report !" on a green
>    background.
> * But if one does include a BOM, then it instead displays a
>    orange warning icon plus this piece of text:
>
>    "UTF-8 BOM found at start of file
>     Explanation
>     The UTF-8 Byte Order Mark (BOM) was found at the beginning of
>     the page. It can sometimes introduce blank spaces or short
>     sequences of strange-looking characters (such as )
>     What to do
>     Using an editor or an appropriate tool, remove the byte order
>     mark from the beginning of the file. This can often be achieved
>     by saving the document with the appropriate settings in the
>     editor. On the other hand, some editors (such as Notepad on
>     Windows) do not give you a choice, and always add the byte order
>     mark. In this case you may need to use a different editor.
>     Further reading "
>
> This information is not optimal.
>
> First: If a page contains a BOM in the start, then it is never visible,
> as long as the parser is Unicode-compatible and as long as the the rest
> of the page adheres to the encoding signatured by the BOM.
>
> Second: Further more, there should be no recommendation/explanation how
> to remove the BOM.
>
> It only diminishes the credibility of the checker to issue such
> warnings and advice.
>
> If you need to signal anything with regard to the BOM, then you should
> signal both when there is and when there isn't a BOM. For users, and
> thanks to the level of UTF-8 support these days, the badness of *not*
> including a BOM can be experienced fare more often than the badness of
> including it.
>
> [1] http://validator.w3.org/i18n-checker/
>

Received on Thursday, 22 November 2012 12:38:58 UTC