Re: pre-HTML5 and the BOM

From: Martin J. Dürst <duerst_at_it.aoyama.ac.jp>
Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2012 18:38:56 +0900

On 2012/07/13 22:31, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> 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'd assume that so-called "modern" browsers don't have such problems.

> I suppose such browsers existed, though I can't be sure.

They indeed did exist.

> 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

This could be toned down a bit, but I still agree (and the Unicode
consortium says the same): There may be good reasons to use a BOM, but
if these reasons don't apply, then don't use it.

Regards, Martin.
Received on Tue Jul 17 2012 - 04:41:37 CDT

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