Keld Jørn Simonsen wrote:
> For UTF-8 there is no need to have a BOM, as there is only one
> way of serializing octets in UTF-8. There is no little-endian
> or big-endian. A BOM is superfluous and will be ignored.
Not so. In plain text, it is a useful signature to distinguish UTF-8 from
other things. See the 3rd question in
<http://www.unicode.org/unicode/faq/utf_bom.html>.
The three bytes EF BB BF is hardly confused with a meaningful sequence in
existing encodings. The only (unlikely) example I know is a couple of Hangul
syllables in UTF-16.
However, as we are talking about text whose encoding is already identified
(e-mail, web), it is in fact quite superfluous to have a signature at all.
But, then, this is superfluous also for other UTF's: what's the purpose of
using an endianness-ambiguous MIME specification (e.g. "UTF-16") and a BOM
to disambiguate it? Isn't it simpler to use an unambiguous specification in
the first place (e.g. "UTF-16BE" or "UTF-16LE")?
BTW, I understand that BOM is just a nickname now: the character has been
renamed as "ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE".
_ Marco
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 00:18:17 EDT