Re: [AC] [WWW] Fix validation, add Ville as Board member.

On Wed, 2003-01-29 at 11:48, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: No, but I think the term "BOM" is a synonym/alias for "Encoding Signature". "ZERO-WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE" is the actual character when used for it's normal purpose, but this character has a dual function; when it appears as the very first thing in an entity it takes on the role of an Encoding Signature which for hysterical raisins is called a "Byte-Order Mark". IOW, AFAICT, when discussing the usage as an encoding signature, it is appropriate to refer to it as either the "Byte-Order Mark" or the "Encoding Signature" and not "ZERO-WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE", despite "Byte-Order Mark" being something of a misnomer, since both "BOM" and "Encoding Signature" refer to the _role_ and not the character itself. It's there in UTF-8 to allow an heuristic parser to identify this as a flavour of UNICODE, and to distinguish UTF-8 from the other transformation formats (such as UTF-16). e.g. Appendix F of the XML 1.0 Recommendation specifies an algorithm for automatically determining the encoding of the entity by sniffing for the encoding signature and falling back on various bit patterns matching "<?xml" in the various candidate encodings if a signature is not present. Then again, this all tends to give me a headache so I'm probably just hopelessly confused. :-)