Tom Gewecke <tom at bluesky dot org> wrote: > --U+FEFF can appear (presumably by accident) at the beginning of any > web page, but aside from those two cases where it is necessary, it is > a ZWNBS and not a BOM. (As Michael pointed out, Mac IE 5.2.2 displays > a Euro symbol).
But as I wrote earlier, a zero-width no-break space at the start of a Web page should not disrupt the content or layout of the page in any way. It's a space. It's zero-width. A Euro symbol is non-conformant and just plain wrong; the page starts with the bytes EF BB BF and is clearly marked as being UTF-8. > Suppose a page has no charset/encoding specified in the markup. Does > the presence of U+FEFF mean it should be presumed to be UTF-16? Some > of my browsers behave this way. Actually, the presence of the bytes FF FE or FE FF. You can't tell whether they mean U+FEFF until you've decided what the encoding is. IMHO, and I believe the HTML spec agrees, initial FE FF or FF FE is a *really* strong hint of UTF-16ness that should not be casually overlooked. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California
