Michael Everson recently pointed out that the Unicode home page seems to begin with the character U+FEFF (ZWNBS/BOM), encoded as UTF-8. Presumably this is an artifact created by the program used to make the page, although I haven't noticed it on any others on the site.
I had a look at the BOM faq and am wondering if any list members could confirm my understanding of the proper use of BOM at the start of web pages: --The only case where a BOM should be used is when the byte order is not specified by the encoding/charset listed in the HTML, i.e. UTF-16 or 32. For all others, including the BE and LE varieties of the latter, it should not be used. --If the page is marked UTF-16 and has no BOM it will be interpreted as UTF-16BE. --U+FEFF can appear (presumably by accident) at the beginning of any web page, but aside from those two cases where it is necessary, it is a ZWNBS and not a BOM. (As Michael pointed out, Mac IE 5.2.2 displays a Euro symbol). Suppose a page has no charset/encoding specified in the markup. Does the presence of U+FEFF mean it should be presumed to be UTF-16? Some of my browsers behave this way.
