Re: Should the IETF be condoning, even promoting, BOM pollution?

[Ted Lemon <mellon@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sep 18, 2017, at 2:01 PM, Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@xxxxxx> wrote:

I believe a better argument is that we do not control the tools that people use to read plain text RFCs, and that we found that some important ones simply work better with the BOM.

If we believe that it is a bug for an application to fail to correctly display a UTF-8 file without a BOM, then the fact that some significant number of apps currently do the wrong thing isn't compelling.  Browsers have very rapid development cycles.   The fact that some browsers Dave Thaler tested three years ago didn't do the right thing is not a good enough reason to use BOMs now.   The question should be "what is the best solution," not "what works best with legacy apps?"

There was a time when a BOM made technical sense, but I think that time is long past.   At this point it's just an onion, and we should stop using it.