From: gpw@uniserve.com
Date: Thu Jan 20 2005 - 07:06:57 CST
Quoting Arcane Jill <arcanejill@ramonsky.com>:
> I enjoy slagging off Microsoft as much as anyone, but this is really out of
> place here. Microsoft did not invent the BOM. Rather, they correctly
> implemented the Unicode Standard. If the Unicode Standard were different in
> this regard, I'm sure that MS text files would follow suit.
This is slightly revisionist. Long, long ago there were only big-endian
encoding schemes with the BOM available to help detect problems. Microsoft
insisted on writing datafiles on Intel platforms in a little-endian format.
Once this practice was entrenched, the standard renamed the old defined
practice as big-endian, documented the little-endian version and created a
third with the BOM at the beginning to let people cope with finding either.
Geoffrey
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