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RE: SAXON and UTF-8
Michael Kay writes:
> > Windows Notepad saves UTF8 files with Byte Order Mark, and
> > AFAIK, the XML
> > parser in Saxon (AElfred) doesn't support this (at least it
> > didn't last time I checked).
> >
>
> The question is, can an XML document (or entity) in UTF-8 encoding start
> with a BOM? The fact that Unicode allows it, and the fact that Notepad can
> create it, doesn't make it legal XML.
>
> My reading of the XML spec is that it expects to find BOM only in UTF-16
> files. I can't see any total prohibition of a BOM in a UTF-8 file, but the
> spec certainly seems to assume that they won't occur. If anyone thinks
> otherwise, I'd like to see evidence from the XML specification, which is the
> only definitive source.
>
> This is of course totally off-topic for XSLT.
At the risk of straying further off topic ...
It's my understanding that UTF-8 is an 8 bit encoding in which there
are certain "prefix" octects which control the meaning of some number
of subsequent octets.
Does it make any sense for an 8 bit encoding to have a byte order
mark. It is after all already an ordered stream of bytes.
Since this is unrelated to XSLT, please reply to me directly at
naha@ai.mit.edu
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