Kinda? It isn't limited to just the byte order tho, but I can see it.
> Why integrate it into the code unit if you're only going to have one of them?
There would be multiple code units, just 1 of the mini headers/BOM.
With that comment I was trying to contrast it to UTF-8 which has those 2 leading bits of the continuation code units set to `0b10`, it wouldn't have that.
I have to say I really don't see the value of being byte-order flexible, but always requiring the header be in the "first" byte, because that makes it so big-endian and little-endian formats are packed completely differently. 2 and 4 byte code units will be misaligned all the time too, might as well just use a series of bytes in fixed order.
> What do you mean by variable width?
Make the first byte be like UTF-8 (so a prefix of 0, 10, 110, or 1110), and the following bytes be raw data. It compacts a lot better than a fixed-length header, with roughly the same level of complexity.
But now that I think about it a continuation bit is probably the best option here because it regains some ability to self-synchronize.
What do you mean by variable width? the 4 bit header would be limited to the first code unit, the following ones would just be pure codepoint values.
and that's a good point, I as picturing it as the top 4 bits that describe the format, so the header's byte order would be field, but the actual codepoint value would be encoded with whatever byte and bit order the header indicated.