Chris Jacobs wrote: > [ cc Theodore Smith ] > > So I had it wrong, it _is_ deprecated.
It isn't exactly "deprecated", since deprecation has a rather strong sense in the standard, and is correlated with the formal assignment of a deprecated property to the character. Use of the code point U+FEFF is clearly *not* deprecated in the standard. The current situation is briefly as follows: The standard *requires* the use of U+FEFF for some of the Unicode encoding schemes. Details are spelled out in: http://www.unicode.org/book/preview/ch03.pdf Because of those requirements and the nature of the encoding scheme definitions, the occurrence of U+FEFF in initial position in *some* of the encoding schemes forces its interpretation as a zero width no-break space, rather than as a byte order mark. The difference is roughly as follows: a BOM is not formally part of the content of the text, but rather is part of the specification of the encoding scheme; a ZWNBSP is formally part of the content of the text. *Because* this distinction, which is required for backwards compatibility with existing usage of U+FEFF, is rather subtle and confusing, and *because*, nonetheless, the idea of having a character to indicate a no-break position is a useful one, the UTC standardized (in Unicode 3.2), U+2060 WORD JOINER as the *preferred* character to use in the latter situation. In other words, if what you need is to glue things together, i.e. a zero width no-break space *function*, then use U+2060. If what you need is a BOM for the encoding scheme specifications, then use U+FEFF. What is *discouraged*, but not prohibited, of course, is using U+FEFF for a zero width no-break space *function*, precisely because that interacts so confusingly with the BOM. --Ken
