- From: olivier Thereaux <ot@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 7 Dec 2006 00:09:31 +0900
- To: Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org>
- Cc: www-validator@w3.org, www-international@w3.org
Hi Chris, On Dec 6, 2006, at 23:35 , Chris Lilley wrote: > 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. I am not an expert so all my knowledge about UTF-8 with BOM comes from hearsay and some documentation I have read, and the picture I was having so far was pointing toward the fact that the BOM for utf-8 was not very necessary (it is only a signature, not a mention of byte order, isn't it?), and indeed sometimes (although perhaps more and more rarely) harmful because of implementations that do not understand the mark. Docs I know include: http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-utf8-bom http://unicode.org/unicode/faq/utf_bom.html#BOM and both seem to point towards a cautious usage of a BOM for utf-8, or no usage at all Do you have other references worth reading on the topic? Thank you. -- olivier
Received on Wednesday, 6 December 2006 15:09:45 UTC