From: Hans Aberg (haberg@math.su.se)
Date: Thu Jan 20 2005 - 08:14:47 CST
On 2005/01/20 12:36, Arcane Jill at arcanejill@ramonsky.com wrote:
> 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.
Actually, other posters said it was the other way around. MS did invent
BOM's for use with UTF-16, and decided it was practical in UTF-8. Unicode
then followed suit, without giving though what would happen on other
platforms.
> And ... turning your reasoning around a little here ... BOM-less text files (I
> would not be so crass as to call them "Unix text files") can just as easily
> cause problems on Unicode Conforming platforms, because the encoding is then
> unknown.
That is evidently not the case on UNIX platforms, where encoding is kept
track of of via locale, nor on say old Mac OS pre-X (MacOS X has the UNIX
BSD at bottom), which has special resources to indicate that. There are some
other platforms which keep track of file encodings and the like via special
encodings.
The main point is that Unicode should not in a character encoding format
impose file format conditions. Unicode can specify special file formats, of
course, but they should not be confused with the character encoding. This
enable platforms to do what is best on each platform.
> If this forum turns into a "my OS is better than your OS" war, I'm leaving.
Even later MS OS have a Mach kernel at the bottom, which is a UNIX kernel
extension that admits threads. and MacOS X already has UNIX BSD at the
bottom. So while the whole world seems become more UNIX'y, Unicode goes its
own way.
Hans Aberg
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