Given all of the below statements, which are true, I see no reason to suggest that this be made actively illegal unless one is hoping to break a lot of clients.
Luckily even if the HTML standard ever agreed with Roozbeh and leaned this way, actual browsers would not want to break their customers so on the whole they would ignore the directive. So I suppose we can just drop the whole thing as a really bad idea, resolved "by [real world] design". MichKa ----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Roozbeh Pournader" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: "Unicode List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, February 16, 2003 12:35 AM Subject: Re: BOM's at Beginning of Web Pages? > . > Roozbeh Pournader wrote, > > > According to the specs, it's illegal, and it doesn't hurt to fix it. So > > why shouldn't one? > > The lack of the BOM in the 'white space' section of the specs may > just be an oversight. > > Since plain text files can have any kind of file extension, and the > *.TXT extension historically covers many different code pages, some > people do find the BOM helpful. It enables some of the editors to > correctly load a file the first time without having to manually > reset the encoding format and reload. > > You're right about the BOM being irrelevant to the browser, since > the HTML encoding is supposed to be declared as mark-up in the > HTML header. But, at least on Win platforms, when the user (or > author) views the source, the default editor (usually Notepad) > seems to require that the BOM be present. NotePad also (AFAICT) > automatically inserts the BOM when "file-saving as" UTF-8. > The non-technical user may not even be aware of this. > > I've found the BOM handy, but could probably live without it on > any of my web pages. Especially if it's going to display as a > Euro symbol on some systems... > > Best regards, > > James Kass > . > >
