For review: The byte-order mark (BOM) in HTML

Comments are requested on the following proposed update of the article The byte-order mark (BOM) in HTML prior to final publication. NOTE THAT the article is in a temporary location, and will be moved to its final location after the review.

The majority of the article has been rewritten, with the aim of reducing the previous warnings against using the BOM for UTF-8 documents. Also taken into account is the change to the HTML5 spec that raises the precedence of the BOM versus the HTTP header in terms of character encoding declaration.

Please send any comments over the next two weeks to www-international@w3.org (subscribe).

We hope to publish a final version at the beginning of the New Year.