Michael Kay writes:
 > > Windows Notepad saves UTF8 files with Byte Order Mark, and
 > > AFAIK, the XML
 > > parser in Saxon (AElfred) doesn't support this (at least it
 > > didn't last time I checked).
 > >
 > 
 > The question is, can an XML document (or entity) in UTF-8 encoding start
 > with a BOM? The fact that Unicode allows it, and the fact that Notepad can
 > create it, doesn't make it legal XML.
 > 
 > My reading of the XML spec is that it expects to find BOM only in UTF-16
 > files. I can't see any total prohibition of a BOM in a UTF-8 file, but the
 > spec certainly seems to assume that they won't occur. If anyone thinks
 > otherwise, I'd like to see evidence from the XML specification, which is the
 > only definitive source.
 > 
 > This is of course totally off-topic for XSLT.

At the risk of straying further off topic ...

It's my understanding that UTF-8 is an 8 bit encoding in which there
are certain "prefix" octects which control the meaning of some number
of subsequent octets.

Does it make any sense for an 8 bit encoding to have a byte order
mark.  It is after all already an ordered stream of bytes.

Since this is unrelated to XSLT, please reply to me directly at

    naha@xxxxxxxxxx



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