Re: Strange advice re BOM and UTF-8

I have requested that someone look at the web site.

One should not recommend against the use of a long-standing standard 
because of a non-compliant web site.


At 2006.12.06-14:48(+0000), Eric J. Bowman wrote:

>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
> >
> >
> >


---Steve Deach
    sdeach@adobe.com

Received on Wednesday, 6 December 2006 15:30:42 UTC