Re: draft-klensin-net-utf8-06

[Julian Reschke <[e-mail]>]

Tim Bray wrote:
> ...
> "  5.  As suggested in Section 6 of RFC 3629, the Byte Order Mark
>        ("BOM") signature MUST NOT appear at the beginning of these text
>        strings."
> 
> It might be worth adding a note something along these lines: "The BOM
> is useful in establishing the endian-ness of UTF-16 and UTF-32
> encodings, but serves no useful purpose in the context of UTF-8."
> ...

The BOM doesn't server any purpose *here* (because we know it's UTF-8).

In general, a BOM starting a UTF-8 encoded octet stream can be a useful 
hint to the recipient if out-of-band encoding information has been lost 
(such as when storing an HTTP response body in a simple file).

Best regards, Julian