Re: validator result query

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 And regardless, the message is outdated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