> A: Another reason not to use UTF-16. UTF-8 has a BOM too, even though byte order is not an issue in this encoding. This is to manifest that this is a UTF-8 stream. If UTF-8 remains the only popular encoding (as it already is in the internet world), the BOM becomes redundant. In practice, many UTF-8 text files omit BOMs today.
That's one of the central points of the article --- "sniffing" is completely unnecessary if you can assume a UTF-8 encoding type.
You're right that the mark isn't useless, we want it to be useless.
> A: Another reason not to use UTF-16. UTF-8 has a BOM too, even though byte order is not an issue in this encoding. This is to manifest that this is a UTF-8 stream. If UTF-8 remains the only popular encoding (as it already is in the internet world), the BOM becomes redundant. In practice, many UTF-8 text files omit BOMs today.
That's one of the central points of the article --- "sniffing" is completely unnecessary if you can assume a UTF-8 encoding type.
You're right that the mark isn't useless, we want it to be useless.