xml-dev - expat whitespace weirdness?

[Tim Crook <tcrook@JetForm.com>]

I was looking around to see if there might have been a particular reason why
expat was implemented such that no leading white space is allowed before the
standard <?xml version="1.0" ?> line. You get the error
XML_ERROR_MISPLACED_XML_PI if there are any leading carriage returns, line
feeds, spaces or tabs.

From my understanding of things, the Byte Order Mark is what allows an XML
parser to determine which character set in use. (see Appendix F,
Autodetection of Character Encodings in http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml) If the
Byte Order Mark is not found, shouldn't the starting content of the data
stream be discarded until the Byte Order Mark is located?