RE: Comments on draft-yergeau-rfc2279bis-00.txt

["McDonald, Ira" <imcdonald@sharplabs.com>]

Hi Mark and Keld,

Thanks for speaking up.

I think we need to carefully distinguish that while Unicode 3.2
and ISO 10646:2000 allow (and seem to encourage) leading BOM
in UTF-8, an IETF 'standards track' RFC that describes UTF-8
usage _for_Internet_protocols_ should preferably say:

1)  Historically, leading BOM usage in the UTF-8 encoding
    has been allowed by ISO 10646.
2)  All Internet protocols SHOULD NOT specify or encourage
    leading BOM usage in the UTF-8 encoding.

(the above wording obviously can be improved - Martin probably
said it better already - if I could only find his note...)

Cheers,
- Ira McDonald (co-editor of Printer MIB v2)
  High North Inc

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Davis [mailto:mark.davis@us.ibm.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 02, 2002 8:17 PM
To: McDonald, Ira
Cc: Bert Wijnen; Francois Yergeau; ietf-charsets@iana.org; 'Patrik
Fältström'
Subject: RE: Comments on draft-yergeau-rfc2279bis-00.txt






I agree that it should not be encouraged, but it should be recognized.

The BOM is also not necessary in a 16-bit UTF either; one can explicitly
used UTF-16BE or UTF-16LE; and of course it complicated things. So ideally
BOM would not be used there either. However, BOM in either case is in
widespread usage, and is allowed in UTF-8.