Ok, this question is totally arcane, but what the heck:
I was just putting together a multi-lingual (Japanese and English) page using UTF8 encoding. No problems, except I have the choice of saving it with or without a BOM (Byte-Order-Mark).
From what I read on the Unicode website it's not necessary with UTF8, but having it does act as a signal that the file is UTF8 encoded if there are no other hints (that is, if it's just a .txt file). And, indeed, when I tried putting a raw text version of the page (that is, .txt, no HTML), if I left off the BOM Safari and Gecko didn't recognize it as a Unicode file unless I explicitly selected that encoding from the menu; with the BOM both seemed to figure it out correctly. Seems like good reason to use it in this case.
Now, in an HTML document (or XHTML, in this case), the header specifies the encoding, so hints like this shouldn't matter one way or another... except when I run it through the W3C's validator, it says that XHTML documents with a BOM aren't well supported in older browsers, so it should be left off.
Obviously no harm in doing so, but does anybody have any idea whether this is totally meaningless arcana or whether this could actually matter in some situation?
I was just putting together a multi-lingual (Japanese and English) page using UTF8 encoding. No problems, except I have the choice of saving it with or without a BOM (Byte-Order-Mark).
From what I read on the Unicode website it's not necessary with UTF8, but having it does act as a signal that the file is UTF8 encoded if there are no other hints (that is, if it's just a .txt file). And, indeed, when I tried putting a raw text version of the page (that is, .txt, no HTML), if I left off the BOM Safari and Gecko didn't recognize it as a Unicode file unless I explicitly selected that encoding from the menu; with the BOM both seemed to figure it out correctly. Seems like good reason to use it in this case.
Now, in an HTML document (or XHTML, in this case), the header specifies the encoding, so hints like this shouldn't matter one way or another... except when I run it through the W3C's validator, it says that XHTML documents with a BOM aren't well supported in older browsers, so it should be left off.
Obviously no harm in doing so, but does anybody have any idea whether this is totally meaningless arcana or whether this could actually matter in some situation?