- From: John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org>
- Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2013 10:33:41 -0500
- To: Paul Hoffman <paul.hoffman@vpnc.org>
- Cc: Allen Wirfs-Brock <allen@wirfs-brock.com>, IETF Discussion <ietf@ietf.org>, JSON WG <json@ietf.org>, Joe Hildebrand Hildebrand <jhildebr@cisco.com>, Anne van Kesteren <annevk@annevk.nl>, "www-tag@w3.org" <www-tag@w3.org>, es-discuss <es-discuss@mozilla.org>
Paul Hoffman scripsit: > The question was specifically about ECMA-404, not ECMA-252. It would be > great to hear from TC39 whether or not ECMA-404 allows or disallows it. The point of issuing standards is so that all may use them, so there is no need to ask anyone. A quick examination of ECMA-404 makes it clear that there are no references to BOMs, whether under that name, or "byte order mark", or "U+FEFF". But that is not determinative for our purposes, because of this statement from the Unicode Standard (I cite section 16.8 of Unicode 6.2, but substantially equivalent statements can be found back to Unicode 3.2): Systems that use the byte order mark must recognize when an initial U+FEFF signals the byte order. In those cases, it is not part of the textual content and should be removed before processing, because otherwise it may be mistaken for a legitimate zero width no-break space. Per contra, ECMA-404 refers only to text(ual content). The BOM is meaningful when transforming byte sequences into code point sequences, but ECMA-404 deals in the latter only. So it is the furthest thing from surprising that it makes no mention of BOMs, and has nothing to say about their use outside text. -- Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out. --Arthur C. Clarke, "The Nine Billion Names of God" John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>
Received on Thursday, 14 November 2013 15:34:10 UTC