Strange advice re BOM and UTF-8

Hello www-validator,

I was surprised to see, on the W3C DTD validator, the following advice:

  The Unicode Byte-Order Mark (BOM) in UTF-8 encoded files is known to
  cause problems for some text editors and older browsers. You may
  want to consider avoiding its use until it is better supported.

This is odd because the use of a BOM with UTF-8 files is

a) standards compliant, to Unicode and to XML and to CSS
b) common practice
c) allows text editors to auto-detect the encoding of a plain text
document.

I believe therefore that the advice is incorrect and indeed
potentially damaging.


-- 
 Chris Lilley                    mailto:chris@w3.org
 Interaction Domain Leader
 Co-Chair, W3C SVG Working Group
 W3C Graphics Activity Lead
 Co-Chair, W3C Hypertext CG

Received on Wednesday, 6 December 2006 14:35:17 UTC