Re: UTF-8 signature / BOM in CSS

> [Original Message]
> From: François Yergeau <francois@yergeau.com>
>
> Ernest Cline a écrit  :
> > Making stuff that was acceptable earlier
> > unacceptable should only be done when there is a compelling
> > reason to do so.  Other than a theological debate over whether it is
> > a character, I see no reason to do so, and that reason is not compelling
> > to me.
>
> Nor to me.  But a much stronger reason for wanting U+FEFF excluded from 
> identifiers is that it is now deprecated in Unicode, because of the 
> ambiguity of its role as a BOM or a ZWNBSP.  Unicode has introduced 
> U+2060 to play the latter role and recommends to use it exclusively. 
> That's about as much a Good Idea as equating the BOM and ZWNBSP
> was a Bad Idea, and it would be nice if CSS could take heed.

I can't say that I agree with that reasoning either.  What about the ten
fully
deprecated characters?  What happens when more Unicode characters
are deprecated?  And finally consider this quote from definition D7a of
the Unicode standard (Section 3.4 Characters and Encoding)

Deprecated characters are _retained_ (emphasis mine) in the standard
so that previously conforming data stay conformant in future versions
of the standard,

Given the total lack of any ability to indicate which version of CSS
was used, treating U+FEFF or the ten fully deprecated characters
differently in CSS seems to me to be a bad idea as it would make
previously conforming CSS no longer conforming, which is clearly
not the intent in deprecating a Unicode character.

Received on Sunday, 7 December 2003 21:44:10 UTC