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

At 04:22 PM 4/12/00 -0700, Tim Bray wrote:
>Consider an author creating an XML document in an editor that happens to
>use UTF-16 and thus (correctly) inserts a BOM.  That document then cannot
>be transmitted as -BE or -LE, even by software that knows its byte
>ordering, because the BOM is forbidden in those variants.

Quite right. That document also then cannot be transmitted as UTF-8, 
ISO-2022-JP, or BIG5, either. UTF-16BE and UTF-16LE are charsets with rules 
just like other charsets.

>   Thus, as
>Murata has long (and correctly) stated, the -BE and -LE variants are
>simply not appropriate for XML documents. -Tim

These two charsets are not appropriate in XML documents that do not have 
the charset tagged. That's true of quite a number of charsets, yes?

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium

Received on Wednesday, 12 April 2000 19:28:21 UTC