Murray Sargent wrote on 1998-10-16 20:55 UTC:
> You can still
> create plain-text UTF-8 files without the leading BOM. But they might not
> get read correctly by the software out there...
I hope that people who write the "software out there" will also provide
other means to signal that the character set if UTF-8, at least under
Unix.
I hope to be able in the near future to use UTF-8 on my Linux box as my
*only* character encoding, just like Plan9 has done it successfully for
years. All my ISO 8859-1 files will be converted one day to UTF-8 and
then ISO 8859-1 will not be used any more in plain text files and file
names. Incoming text files (mail, web, etc.) will be autoconverted from
whatever to UTF-8 or will manually go through recode.
I hope that I can bring all software that I use to be UTF-8 aware by
setting an environment variable (e.g., LC_CTYPE=UTF-8) or something like
that, and I hope that then I do *not* have to prefix every single
plain-text file under Unix with a BOM (horrible idea ...).
Markus
-- Markus G. Kuhn, Security Group, Computer Lab, Cambridge University, UK email: mkuhn at acm.org, home page: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
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