- From: Martin J. Duerst <duerst@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 02 Feb 1999 23:02:25 +0900
- To: Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@imc.org>
- Cc: MURATA Makoto <murata@apsdc.ksp.fujixerox.co.jp>, ietf-charsets@iana.org
I see good reasons for having the BOM with charset="UTF-16". I see no reason for having a BOM with charset="UTF-16BE" or charset="UTF-16LE". I think if we have all three labels and for each of them more or less have "use a BOM or not as you like", we have the same mess as before, just with more labels. I think there are people who believe in the BOM, and others that think it's a bad idea. My guess is that it's very difficult to change that. But I think what we can do is to try and make clear from the sender to the receiver what the position of the sender was. Basically, then, BOM-lovers would use charset="UTF-16", and BOM-haters would use charset="UTF-16BE" or charset="UTF-16LE". We would have several different things, but we would know which is which. We wouldn't have to change XML, only to add a clarification to say that "UTF-16" in the XML spec means only the case charset="UTF-16", and not the others. What do you think about it? Regards, Martin. At 19:40 99/02/01 -0800, Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote: > At 11:39 AM 2/2/99 +0900, MURATA Makoto wrote: > >I have a question. I know that many people would like to make the > >BOM optional. But what is the reason for making it optional? > >If we can say that the BOM is mandatory and is merely an artifact for > >encoding, this RFC becomes much simpler. > > But it's pretty clear that not everyone would follow it because some UTF-16 > editing software does BOMs, other doesn't. So instead of making it > mandatory and having many creators ignore it, it seems better to deal with > the reality of today. I don't think that the wording is all that confusing. > > --Paul Hoffman, Director > --Internet Mail Consortium > > #-#-# Martin J. Du"rst, World Wide Web Consortium #-#-# mailto:duerst@w3.org http://www.w3.org
Received on Tuesday, 2 February 1999 11:54:42 UTC