31 Jan
2005
31 Jan
'05
10:53 a.m.
On 2005-01-31, Bayley, Alistair
From: Aaron Denney [mailto:wnoise@ofb.net]
Better yet would be to have the standard never allow the BOM.
Since some things can't handle it, on output we should never emit it, but still must handle it on input. Bah.
I don't see how banning it from input would help; as I understand it, it's meant to be ignored anyway, so there's no loss or gain there.
Backwards compatibility, e.g. Kernel looking for the two bytes '#!' at the beginning of a shell script. UTF-8 was supposed to be for backwards compatibility with ASCII with minimal fuss. Having to handle a BOM transparently at the beginning is no longer minimal fuss. -- Aaron Denney -><-