[SG16] Draft proposal: Clarify guidance for use of a BOM as a UTF-8 encoding signature

[JF Bastien]

It’s a bit odd: if you assume the default is ascii then you don’t need
this. If you assume the default is utf8 then you don’t need this... so when
do you need the BOM? It seems like making bad prior choices more
acceptable... even though they were bad choices. I’m not sure it’s a good
idea.

On Sun, Oct 11, 2020 at 8:22 PM Tom Honermann via SG16 <
sg16 at lists.isocpp.org> wrote:

> On 10/10/20 7:58 PM, Alisdair Meredith via SG16 wrote:
>
> One concern I have, that might lead into rationale for the current
> discouragement,
> is that I would hate to see a best practice that pushes a BOM into ASCII
> files.
> One of the nice properties of UTF-8 is that a valid ASCII file (still very
> common) is
> also a valid UTF-8 file.  Changing best practice would encourage updating
> those
> files to be no longer ASCII.
>
> Thanks, Alisdair.  I think that concern is implicitly addressed by the
> suggested resolutions, but perhaps that can be made more clear.  One
> possibility would be to modify the "protocol designer" guidelines to
> address the case where a protocol's default encoding is ASCII based and to
> specify that a BOM is only required for UTF-8 text that contains non-ASCII
> characters.  Would that be helpful?
>
>
> Tom.
>
>
> AlisdairM
>
> On Oct 10, 2020, at 14:54, Tom Honermann via SG16 <sg16 at lists.isocpp.org>
> wrote:
>
> Attached is a draft proposal for the Unicode standard that intends to
> clarify the current recommendation regarding use of a BOM in UTF-8 text.
> This is follow up to discussion on the Unicode mailing list
> <https://corp.unicode.org/pipermail/unicode/2020-June/008713.html> back
> in June.
>
> Feedback is welcome.  I plan to submit
> <https://www.unicode.org/pending/docsubmit.html> this to the UTC in a
> week or so pending review feedback.
>
> Tom.
> <Unicode-BOM-guidance.pdf>--
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