- From: John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>
- Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2006 15:52:01 -0500
- To: d.k@philo.de
- Cc: public-xml-core-wg@w3.org
Our apologies for the long delay in responding to your message. The content of this message has been approved by the XML Core WG. You wrote at <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-editor/2006JulSep/0007.html>: > Appendix F.1 of the XML specs presents examples about how to > automatically detect the encoding of an entity from the first > characters of an XML encoding declaration without a byte order mark. > These examples include UTF-16BE and UTF-16LE. However, section 4.3.3 > says that entities encoded in UTF-16 MUST begin with a byte order mark. That is strictly limited to the UTF-16 encoding, and excludes the related UTF-16LE and UTF-16BE encodings, in which BOMs are not present. Note that "UTF16-LE" does not mean "UTF-16 encoding whose BOM shows it to be little-endian" but rather "UTF-16-like encoding in little-endian order without a BOM." If U+FEFF appears at the beginning of a UTF-16LE or UTF16-BE document, it is not a BOM but a ZWNBSP character (and therefore the document cannot be well-formed XML. cannot be well-formed XML), not a BOM. > In the light of the examples it seems that the intention of the specs is > to demand a UTF-16 byte order mark only when no XML declaration is used. > Is this interpretation of the specs correct? No. If the encoding is UTF-16, a BOM is mandatory, whether or not an XML declaration is present. > If the answer is "no", I would suggest to remove the two incriminated > examples from Appendix F.1 and to add an appropriate warning. The examples are not in error, because they refer to the UTF-16LE and UTF-16BE encodings rather than the UTF-16 encoding. The Core WG will be adding language to 4.3.3 stating that UTF-16BE and UTF-16LE are specifically not UTF-16. -- I marvel at the creature: so secret and John Cowan so sly as he is, to come sporting in the pool cowan@ccil.org before our very window. Does he think that http://www.ccil.org/~cowan Men sleep without watch all night?
Received on Wednesday, 20 December 2006 20:52:18 UTC