UTF-16 in external entities

[Steve Schafer]

I have a question regarding what appears to be an inconsistency
between the original XML 1.0 spec and one of the errata. Erratum E44
contains the following:

"Add the following to the second paragraph after the list (this also
takes care of the previous erratum on UTF-7): 'Note: Since external
parsed entities in UTF-16 may begin with any character...'"

Whereas the second paragraph of section 4.3.3 says:

"Entities encoded in UTF-16 must begin with the Byte Order Mark..."

I'm inclined to believe the original spec. If an external parsed
entity encoded in UTF-16 does in fact begin with the Byte Order Mark,
then I can't see any way in which the autodetection algorithm would
fail (barring the pathological cases of an 8-bit-encoded entity
beginning with the characters FE FF or FF FE, of course).

-Steve Schafer


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