On 10/08/11 02:18, pansz wrote:
On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 11:13 PM, Tony Mechelynck
<[email protected]> wrote:
That message is outdated. The BOM is supported in all Unicode encodings
including UTF-8 by all "reasonably recent" browers. It is also part of the
HTML standard.
BOM is a standard for UCS2 or UTF-16, not for UTF-8.
According to the Unicode FAQ,
http://www.unicode.org/faq//utf_bom.html#bom4 (two successive FAQ
questions) a BOM can be used in UTF-8 as well as in UTF-16 or UTF-32;
but since UTF-8 doesn't have endianness variants, with UTF-8 it
specifies encoding only, not endianness. BTW, "good" editors (including
at least Vim and WordPad, possibly others) handle the BOM correctly,
even in UTF-8. In fact, in my experience WordPad won't read UTF-8 text
correctly _unless_ there is a BOM.
However (about your next paragraph), when UTF-8 is fed "transparently"
to a program which expects ASCII, and in particular to any program which
expects #! at the start of a file, the BOM should not be used (see the
2nd FAQ question linked above, and also
http://www.unicode.org/faq//utf_bom.html#bom10 "How I should deal with
BOMs?", point 3.
BOM for utf-8 will cause problem for most programs which expect text
streams. gcc is a good example, most GNU CLI utilities will reject
utf-8 with BOM.
I explicitly mentioned in the part you snipped that for some other kinds
of text than HTML or CSS (such as, I said, source files and shell
scripts) it is better to save the file without a BOM.
And, W3C validator will of course complain about it...
...with a warning, not an error; and Tidy won't.
Best regards,
Tony.
--
"My weight is perfect for my height -- which varies"
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