Comment by mikelabatt

Nice article, thank you. I love UTF-8, but I only advocate it when used with a BOM. Otherwise, an application may have no way of knowing that it is UTF-8, and that it needs to be saved as UTF-8.

Imagine selecting New/Text Document in an environment like File Explorer on Windows: if the initial (empty) file has a BOM, any app will know that it is supposed to be saved again as UTF-8 once you start working on it. But with no BOM, there is no such luck, and corruption may be just around the corner, even when the editor tries to auto-detect the encoding (auto-detection is never easy or 100% reliable, even for basic Latin text with "special" characters)

The same can happen to a plain ASCII file (without a BOM): once you edit it, and you add, say, some accented vowel, the chaos begins. You thought it was Italian, but your favorite text editor might conclude it's Vietnamese! I've even seen Notepad switch to a different default encoding after some Windows updates.

So, UTF-8 yes, but with a BOM. It should be the default in any app and operating system.