Leif Halvard Silli, Fri, 13 Jul 2012 13:44:42 +0200: > I do at least not think that user agents that > want to be conforming pre-HTML5 user agents have any justification for > ignoring the BOM.
* The effect of the BOM - as encoding signature - is not discussed anywhere in HTML4 or in the 'text/html' MIME registration. We can say that HTML4 is/became under-specified. * The Appendix C of XHTML does not give any advice against including the BOM in the XHTML file, before serving it as 'text/html'. * No pre-HTML5 browsers that I know, go into Quirks Mode because of the BOM. (But - for that matter - quirks mode was not specced before HTML5 either.) 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. But since HTML4 was open-ended with regard to encodings - it did not spec any specific encodings, HTML4 effectively said that encodings could come and go, and eventually develop. So I think pre-HTML5 browsers for that reason can not legitimately behave as these BOM intolerant browsers do. -- Leif Halvard Silli
