[taffer]

I respectfully disagree. The BOM is a Windows-specific idiosyncrasy resulting from its early adoption of UTF-16. In the Unix world, a BOM is unexpected and causes problems with many programs, such as GCC, PHP and XML parsers. Don't use it!

The correct approach is to use and assume UTF-8 everywhere. 99% of websites use UTF-8. There is no reason to break software by adding a BOM.