- From: Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
- Date: Thu, 26 May 2011 20:12:18 +0300
- To: www-validator@w3.org
26.05.2011 19:54, Michael[tm] Smith wrote: > teamkilimanjaro1@gmail.com, 2011-05-26 15:22 +0200: > >> I recently ran the Validator for my site ( http://www.teamkilimanjaro.com ) >> and the tool informed me that: "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". >> >> Do you have any idea when it will be supported by all browsers? Or do I need >> to act now and make the changes? > > I don't think you need to change anything for that. For one thing, that > message is a warning, not an error. And regardless, the message is outdated > and should be removed from the validator. Agreed. I haven't noticed any BOM related problems on web pages for years. There's a dusty page at the W3C site, http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-utf8-bom.en Last updated in 2006, it says: "[...] on Windows, the most popular browsers cope well these days with the UTF-8 signature, unless it is contained in a PHP include file." > (And I hardly > think we need to be having the validator emit messages about things that > could cause problems for text editors that don't have real Unicode support.) In fact, the _lack_ of BOM might cause more problems than its presence. I recently noticed that Windows WordPad (not really a text editor but a simple word processor, but still) fails to open properly a UTF-8 encoded file that has no BOM but opens one with the BOM well (though it is unable to save in UTF-8 format). This is understandable in the sense that the BOM acts as a virtually certain indication of a UTF-8 encoded file. -- Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Received on Thursday, 26 May 2011 17:12:49 UTC