Re: BOM's at Beginning of Web Pages? Mac IE's Euro

[Deborah Goldsmith]

I can't explain why IE 5.2.2 is displaying the UTF-8 BOM as a Euro. It's important to understand that IE 5.2.x does not use Unicode for rendering. It takes the following approach:

1. Convert the text from the specified character set to runs of text in various Mac OS encodings.
2. Draw each text run using a font appropriate for that Mac OS encoding.

Any character that cannot be converted into a Mac OS encoding will be converted into "?". If you look at the source for the Unicode home page in IE, you'll see that there is indeed a "?" at the beginning, as there is no mapping from U+FEFF to any Mac OS encoding. I have no idea why that is rendering as �.

I've already written a bug against Safari that it should handle BOMs (browsers need to handle lots of things that are not legal HTML).

Deborah Goldsmith
Manager, Fonts & Unicode
Apple Computer, Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]