Re: pre-HTML5 and the BOM

"Martin J. Dürst", Wed, 18 Jul 2012 17:20:31 +0900:
> On 2012/07/18 16:35, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
>> "Martin J. Dürst", Wed, 18 Jul 2012 11:00:42 +0900:
>
>>> The best reason is simply that nobody should be using
>>> crutches as long as they can walk with their own legs.
>>
>> Crutches, in that sense, is only about authoring convenience.
>> […] Nevertheless: I, as Web author, would perhaps skip that
>> convenience if I knew that doing so could improve e.g. HTML5
>> browser's ability to sniff the encoding correctly […]
>
> I'm not sure there are many people for whom using named character
> entities or numeric character references is a convenience. But for
> those for whom it is a convenience, let them use it.

By all means: Let them.

But the W3C's I18N working group still gives out advice about when to
(not) use escapes.[1] Advice which the homepage of W3.org breaks -
since every non-ASCII character of http://www.w3.org is escaped.

What the I18N group says in that document, is a bit moralistic (along
the lines 'please think about how difficult it is for non-English
authors to read escapes for all their characters). It seems to me that
a mention of real effects on browser behavior could be a better form of
advice. Especially when coupled with advice about avoiding the BOM.[2]

[1] http://www.w3.org/International/techniques/authoring-html#escapes
[2] http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-byte-order-mark#bomhow

-- 
Leif Halvard Silli