XML and special Characters : unicode v3.0 ?

[Tim Bray]

At 02:09 PM 3/1/99 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
>Timothaeus Bray scripsit:
>
>> [D]id you know the BOM was legal in UTF-8?
>
>The BOM isn't just a BOM, it's also the ZWNBSP (zero-width
>non-breaking space; no, I do not know how to pronounce that
>acronym) character, and is interpreted as a BOM only at the
>beginning of UCS-2 or UTF-16 documents.  Not to worry; the character is
>as near to a no-op as Unicode allows for.

I think there is reason for worry.  In a UTF-16 document, you can
have a BOM and then the <?xml version=?>, and that PI will still
be recognized as the XML declaration.  The spec is, I think,
pretty clear, that a ZWNBSP or any other *data* character before
the XML declaration is verboten.  So... it seems that in UTF8,
a ZWNBSP as first character in the file isn't a data character.
Blecch.

 -Tim

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