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

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

At 14:25 99/02/03 +0900, MURATA Makoto wrote:


> UTF-16 XML entities do *not* have to begin with '<?xml'.  Thus, if the BOM 
> is made optional, we have a problem when the charset parameter is not 
> available.

I have no problem with requiring the BOM on un-tagged UTF-16. But we
are discussing the tags here, and so we have the assumption that it
is tagged. Untagged does not concern us at all.

And once it is tagged, we know what it is. The BOM is very helpful
if it's tagged "UTF-16", because that tag is inherently ambiguous.
So I can agree with making that required for XML. That's what
the XML spec does.

If something is tagged "UTF-16BE" or "UTF-16LE", then it's not "UTF-16",
and the XML specification doesn't speak about that. The XML specification
does not require that a processor accept "UTF-16BE" or "UTF-16LE". It
would be magic if any processor would know these labels before they got
invented.

Regards,   Martin. 


#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, World Wide Web Consortium
#-#-#  mailto:duerst@w3.org   http://www.w3.org