• From: Rob Lugt <roblugt@e...>
• To: xml-dev@l..., Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
• Date: Wed, 04 Jul 2001 09:45:58 +0100

Tim Bray wrote:
>
> Actually, I think that the UTF-8 BOM is a deeply stupid idea that
> serves no useful purpose in any imaginable universe.  We wouldn't
> be thinking about were it not for the fact that MS Notepad happens
> to write one for UTF-8 documents.

I agree that a UTF-8 BOM certainly doesn't serve the purpose of establishing
"Byte Order" - which one would imagine was the purpose of a Byte Order Mark.
However, I can see that it serves a useful purpose in indicating to software
whether a text file is encoded in UTF-8 or some other 8-bit encoding such as
ISO-8859-1.  Of course this is redundant for xml files, but it is useful for
general-purpose software.  So, perhaps there is another Universe after all?

Regards
~Rob

• References:
  • RE: UTF-8 BOM
    • From: Michael Brennan <Michael_Brennan@a...>
  • Re: UTF-8 BOM
    • From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>

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