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

[Francois Yergeau <yergeau@alis.com>]

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.

It is not acceptable for protocols that frequently exchange little snippets
of data to always have to put in a BOM and check it at the receiving end.
Far more efficient to agree at the beginning on endianness and then
transmit only the significant characters. 

And later:
>In this I-D, the BOM is a part of the text body rather than an artifact 
>for encoding.

It is part of the MIME object (must be, for signature verification for
instance).  After MIME processing, the BOM may or may not be part of the
text.  In XML it is not, by virtue of the XML spec.

>  If this I-D becomes an RFC, XML is allowed to say that 
>the BOM is mandatory, in my opinion.  In fact, the BOM is already mandatory 
>in XML 1.0.

Yes, this must be preserved, IMHO.

>  Since XML is pervasive, the BOM is likely to become almost 
>compulsory.

For big document-like chunks, yes, but there are many other things under
the sun.
-- 
François