Joseph Boyle <Boyle at siebel dot com> wrote: > Software currently under development could use the identifiers for > choosing whether to require or emit BOM, like the file requirements > checker I have to write, and ICU/uconv.
Alternatively, software could use a completely separate flag to indicate whether a BOM is to be written or not. That is what SC UniPad does, for instance. Any type of Unicode file -- UTF-32, UTF-16, UTF-8, SCSU, even UTF-7 -- can have a BOM or not. Encoding identifiers that have been overloaded to denote the presence or absence of BOM, such as "UTF-16" to indicate there is a BOM and "UTF-16LE" or "-BE" to indicate there isn't, are often misused and may not be as useful as you think. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California
