Paul Hoffman scripsit:
> The question was specifically about ECMA-404, not ECMA-252. It would be
> great to hear from TC39 whether or not ECMA-404 allows or disallows it.
The point of issuing standards is so that all may use them, so there is
no need to ask anyone. A quick examination of ECMA-404 makes it clear
that there are no references to BOMs, whether under that name, or "byte
order mark", or "U+FEFF".
But that is not determinative for our purposes, because of this statement
from the Unicode Standard (I cite section 16.8 of Unicode 6.2, but
substantially equivalent statements can be found back to Unicode 3.2):
Systems that use the byte order mark must recognize when an
initial U+FEFF signals the byte order. In those cases, it is
not part of the textual content and should be removed before
processing, because otherwise it may be mistaken for a legitimate
zero width no-break space.
Per contra, ECMA-404 refers only to text(ual content). The BOM is
meaningful when transforming byte sequences into code point sequences,
but ECMA-404 deals in the latter only. So it is the furthest thing
from surprising that it makes no mention of BOMs, and has nothing to
say about their use outside text.
--
Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
--Arthur C. Clarke, "The Nine Billion Names of God"
John Cowan <cowan@xxxxxxxx>