Re: pre-HTML5 and the BOM

From: Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela_at_cs.tut.fi>
Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2012 16:31:16 +0300

2012-07-13 16:12, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:

> The kind of BOM intolerance I know about in user agents is that some
> text browsers and IE5 for Mac (abandoned) "convert" the BOM into a
> (typically empty) line a the start of the <body> element.

I wonder if there is any evidence of browsers currently in use that have
problems with BOM. I suppose such browsers existed, though I can't be
sure. In any cases, for several years I haven't seen any descriptions of
real-life observations, but there are rumors and warnings, and people
get disturbed. Even reputable sites have instructions against using BOM:

"When the BOM is used in web pages or editors for UTF-8 encoded content
it can sometimes introduce blank spaces or short sequences of
strange-looking characters (such as ). For this reason, it is usually
best for interoperability to omit the BOM, when given a choice, for
UTF-8 content."
   http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-byte-order-mark

In reality, BOM surely helps rather than hurts, especially when a
document is saved locally and HTTP headers are thereby lost. Authoring
tools may have problems with it (and then again, some tools have
problems with UTF-8 files that _lack_ BOM).

Yucca
Received on Fri Jul 13 2012 - 08:32:46 CDT

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