Re: Revised proposal for UTF-16

["Martin J. Duerst" <duerst@w3.org>]

At 07:39 98/05/22 -0700, Dan Kegel wrote:
> At 03:29 PM 5/18/98 +0900, MURATA Makoto wrote:
> >Here is the revised verion of the proposal.  Have we reached a consensus?
> >
> >Makoto
> >-----------------------------------------------------------------------
> >We propose to register UTF-16 as a charset in IANA.  
> >
> >UTF-16 should be sent in network byte order (big-endian).  However, 
> >recipients should be able to handle both big-endian and little-endian.
> 
> Apologies if this is already addressed somewhere.
> I think it might be good to add the lines:
> 
> If UTF-16 is sent in little-endian byte order, it MUST be prefixed with
> a BOM to allow recipients to determine the byte order.
> UTF-16 sent in network byte order MAY be prefixed with a BOM.

Yes, please add these lines (with the correct name AND "Byte Order Mark
(BOM)",
because many people know it under that name).

It IS addresses elsewhere (both in Unicode and in ISO 10646),
but repeating it is very important; some people tend to ignore it.

I don't think that we should forbid little-endian. I understand Eric's
and Chris' arguments, but there is too much practice out there to handle
both endiannesses together in the context of UTF-16 that I think we
would just get ignored.

Regards,   Martin.