This thread seems just about ended, and I don't want to be the person to revive it, but there have been numerous related topics in the past six months, and nothing in them answers the question that has been nagging me.
The question is "Considering the difficulty af actually getting access to a file in such a manner that the 'endian-ness' of the computer architecture is NOT transparent, why do we even need a byte-order mark?" To expand on this, imagine there is a text file in some encoding on some medium created by a little-endian machine (say a DEC Vax or a Macintosh 68000), and it is to be accessed on a big-endian machine (any Intel 8080 -- Pentium architecture). Unless the two CPUs are sharing the same RAM in order to share the file data in that RAM, the data will have to be accessed by reading some storage medium, such as mag tape, floppy disc, hard disc, CD-ROM, etc, or by some file transfer method on a network. _All_ of these accessing methods are either bit-serial or byte-serial, transmitting the most significant bit of the most significant byte first, and the little/big-endian storage in the RAM receiving buffers is done correctly by the target machine. True, the low-level programming in a portable OS such as *NIX, say, has to take cognizance of endian-ness, but even that is pretty sparse. I acknowledge that the BOM _can_ be used to differentiate between various encodings -- UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32, non-Unicode -- but then, that has _nothing_ to do with byte order. Perhaps it should be renamed? Or am I missing something important? George
