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Re: Byte-order-marks considered harmful
Den man, 29 nov 1999 skrev du:
> [Sorry for the delay, I have been on holidays]
>
> Kai Henningsen wrote:
...
> > Let's be reasonable. The whole *point* of using UTF-8 is to remain ASCII-
> > compatible. Putting in BOMs is not ASCII-compatible.
>
> I don't understand this remark. If the file only contains ASCII characters
> (<128) there should be no BOM, since the UTF-8 file is equal to the ASCII
> file, thus it's not really UTF-8 encoded. When there are non-ASCII
> characters, the file is not ASCII compatible and the BOM can be used.
I think what he means is that you can treat an ASCII file as if it were a
UTF-8 file from now on, an ASCII file and a UTF-8 file without any two-byte
characters are completely similar. You can replace the ASCII encoding with
UTF-8.
The problem is not ASCII but the ISO-8859-[1-9] encodings, especially
ISO-8859-1 that has become standard in Linux for lack of a better alternative.
--
Med venlig hilsen/Best regards
Birger Langkjer
http://members.xoom.com/langkjer
-
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
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