On Wed, Oct 03 2007 10:07:55 +0100, mike@s... wrote:
> In UTF-8, at the start of a file it is 
>> just a nonsense character, useless, out-of-place, a sign of 
>> bad programming, and it messes up encoding detectors
>
> I'd have said it's a three-byte sequence which tells you pretty reliably
> that you're dealing with a UTF-8 encoded file - provided of course that you
> are looking for it. Agreed, BOM is a misnomer.
>
> I'm not defending the decision to add it to the XML spec by means of an
> erratum, however.

The usefulness or otherwise of U+FEFF in UTF-8 has been subject to
reinterpretation over the years.

In the Unicode Standard 2.0, there was no mention of U+FEFF with UTF-8,
either in the section on the BOM or in the appendix defining UTF-8.

In the Unicode Standard 3.0, section 13.6, "Specials", includes:

   Although there are never any questions of byte-order with UTF-8 text,
   this sequence can serve as signature for UTF-8 encoded text where the
   character set is unmarked.

In the Unicode Standard 5.0, section 3.10, "Unicode Encoding Schemes",
includes:

   While there is obviously no need for a byte order signature when
   using UTF-8, there are occasions when processes convert UTF-16 or
   UTF-32 data containing a byte order mark into UTF-8. When represented
   in UTF-8, the byte order mark turns into the byte sequence <EF BB
   BF>. Its usage at the beginning of a UTF-8 data stream is neither
   required nor recommended by the Unicode Standard, but its presence
   does not affect conformance to the UTF-8 encoding scheme.
   Identification of the <EF BB BF> byte sequence at the beginning of a
   data stream can, however, be taken as a near-certain indication that
   the data stream is using the UTF-8 encoding scheme.

So it's gone from irrelevant to useful to "Oh, if you must".

(BTW, in other reinterpretations, "Unicode Encoding Scheme" results from
splitting the meaning of "UTF", and the use of U+FEFF to indicate
non-breaking is deprecated these days.)

The Unicode FAQ both lists its use as a signature [1] and says to avoid
its use where "byte oriented protocols expect ASCII characters at the
beginning of a file" [2].  However, I don't think that XML necessarily
counts as one such byte oriented protocol.

Regards,


Tony Graham.
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[1] http://www.unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html#29
[2] http://www.unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html#28