From: Arcane Jill (arcanejill@ramonsky.com)
Date: Thu Jan 20 2005 - 07:42:54 CST
I'm not revisionist, just ignorant. I didn't know that then; now I do. Thanks
for the info.
Jill
PS. Hans - see what I mean about my making a fool of myself? It happens. :-)
-----Original Message-----
From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]On
Behalf Of gpw@uniserve.com
Sent: 20 January 2005 13:07
To: Unicode
Subject: Re: UTF-8 'BOM'
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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