Standard Standards Rant

Terje> It's there in UTF-8 to allow an heuristic parser Heuristic is the operative term here. Ah, the stench of Microsoft in mid-winter.... Terje> Then again, this all tends to give me a headache so I'm Terje> probably just hopelessly confused. :-) I'm sure you have a headache, and I'm sure you're confused, although far from hopeless. :-) This is precisely why Microsoft is guilty of criminal monopolization under the law. There never was a need for little-endian UTF-16, and there is no need for a UTF-8 encoding signature in XML. However, Microsoft has long since recognized that every dollar they spend dealing with gratuitous complexity (1) gives you a headache so you're less productive, and (2) thereby pays them back with $10 in monopoly power. "Embrace and Extend[tm]." Standards should be ruthlessly spare and cold. To err is human, of course, so software should be divinely forgiving and educational: "Dammit, Beavis, that's not XML, because it's not UTF-8 and you didn't say _what_ it is. But we'll let you go this time...." -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.