[rfc-i] New version: draft-hoffman-utf8-rfcs-04.txt

[Julian Reschke]

Joe Touch wrote:
> I thought there was consensus to NOT include the BOM in these files (at
> least there were three of us who spoke up on the issue).

There were people in favor (such as myself), and people arguing against 
it. Nobody has declared consensus.

> If support for UTF-8 was in fact as universal as asserted in this doc,
> why is a BOM needed at all?

That has nothing to do with UTF-8 support being universal or not.

The issue is that once encoding information is lost (such as when 
transferred via FTP, or loaded from the file system), many clients use a 
default encoding. Some of those clients however look at the start of the 
file, detect the BOM, and use UTF-8 instead (such as Notepad and Wordpad).

So this is a problem of text/plain (not having optional inline encoding 
information such as XML or HTML), not a problem of UTF-8.

BR, Julian