Re: draft-hoffman-utf16-01.txt available

[Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@imc.org>]

At 11:39 AM 2/2/99 +0900, MURATA Makoto wrote:
>I have a question.  I know that many people would like to make the 
>BOM optional.  But what is the reason for making it optional?  
>If we can say that the BOM is mandatory and is merely an artifact for 
>encoding, this RFC becomes much simpler.

But it's pretty clear that not everyone would follow it because some UTF-16
editing software does BOMs, other doesn't. So instead of making it
mandatory and having many creators ignore it, it seems better to deal with
the reality of today. I don't think that the wording is all that confusing.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium