Re: Strange advice re BOM and UTF-8

The case in point is Macromedia HomeSite, which is still widely used by 
working web developers but is not Unicode compliant.  Opening and saving XML 
documents in HomeSite will lead to multiple BOMs -- the first one may be 
standards-compliant but the rest are unsightly!

-Eric

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Chris Lilley [mailto:chris@w3.org]
>Sent: Wednesday, December 6, 2006 08:35 AM
>To: www-validator@w3.org
>Cc: www-international@w3.org
>Subject: 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 15:10:31 UTC