Re: UTF-16BL/LE,... (was: Re: I18N issues with the XML Specification

At the risk of offending those who have followed this discussion
in much more detail than I have...

Is there any reason not to treat UTF-16BE and UTF-16LE just
like other non-required encodings, ala ISO-8859-1
and ISO-2022-JP and such? i.e. you can use it, but not
without an explicit declaration (either in the XML entity
or in the HTTP headers or filesystem metadata or ...), and beware
that not all processors are required to read it; you may
well get a 'sorry, I don't grok that encoding' error.

Tim Bray wrote:
> 
> At 05:44 PM 4/12/00 +0900, Martin J. Duerst wrote:
> >The first issue I have (almost) completed is the one
> >on UTF-16BE/LE, at:
> >http://www.w3.org/International/Group/issues/xml/Overview.html#utf16.be.le
> 
> For the record, and this will come as no surprise, I totally oppose this
> change, because I do *not* think 16LE and 16BE are appropriate for use with
> XML, as they fly in the face of XML's orientation towards interoperability
> across heterogeneous systems.  I think XML entities encoded in any flavor
> of UTF-16 should always have a BOM; exactly what the current spec [correctly
> IMHO] says.
> 
> I have never heard a remotely plausible argument or use-case for why you
> might want to create an XML document in UTF-16 without a BOM.
> 
> Sorry, Martin. -Tim

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
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Received on Wednesday, 12 April 2000 12:09:30 UTC