At 07:15 PM 2/14/02 -0800, Rick Cameron wrote: >You may not be surprised to learn that Microsoft (or, at least, one of its >programmers) does not agree with you. When I save a file from Notepad on >Windows XP in UTF-8, the file contains a BOM.
As others have patiently explained there are situations where a UTF-8 BOM might be useful and many other situations where it harmful. IMHO the UTF-8 use of BOM destroys the 'ASCII' transparency of UTF-8 some ways. I.e. if I have a file that's all ASCII, moving it to UTF-8 should leave it unchanged, byte for byte. Adding a BOM destroys the ability to send files through some legacy tools that either cannot handle the non-ASCII characters at the beginning or look for information in the 'first' character of a file, or cause problems by concatenating the BOM into he middle of a file. Ever since MS let the cat out of the bag with notepad, the rush is on for all tools to be upgraded to handle the situation. Fine, this is the real world. A./
