From: jameskass@att.net
Date: Sun Feb 16 2003 - 03:35:31 EST
.
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
.
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