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Richard Tobin wrote:
>>If a BOM appears, it determines the encoding.
>
> According to which standard? Unicode says (section 13.6):
>
> Where the character set information is explicitly marked, such as in
> UTF-16BE or UTF-16LE, then all U+FEFF characters, even at the very
> beginning of text, are to be interpreted as zero width no-break
> spaces.
It's worse than that. Last time I checked, the media-type RFC for
UTF16-LE and -BE *forbade* the use of a BOM entirely. This led to some
fairly prolonged snarling back and forth; my position was, and remains,
that these formats are therefore not suitable for use with XML. That
may be OK, the people who care about this seem mainly motivated by
applications where the Unicode text appears in short database fields
whose type is declared elsewhere.
--
Cheers, Tim Bray
(ongoing fragmented essay: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/)
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