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Re:HEAD – A guide to <head> elements by kevin_thibedeau on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @03:26AM (#21122826)
It makes zero sense to specify a byte order for an encoding in which it is irrelevant. It only persists because of a lazy vendor that can't encode Unicode correctly.
Re:HEAD – A guide to <head> elements by erik_seaberg on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @03:29AM (#21122849)
It would have been nice if every well-encoded Unicode document started with BOM and every legacy doc did not, instead of having to guess whether a doc is more likely UTF-8 or Latin-1.
Re:HEAD – A guide to <head> elements by account42 on Wednesday October 02, 2019 @06:54AM (#21135049)
Then concatenating to valid Unicode documents would no longer be valid Unicode. That is bad. And ASCII text would no longer be a valid UTF-8 encoded Unicode document. That is bad. And even when everything has finally switched to UTF-8 every tool ever will still need to handle the BOM. That is bad.

Guessing between valid UTF-8 and Latin-1 is only ever ambiguous when there are multiple non-ASCII characters in a row and all those sequences are made up of a lead byte with the correct number of trailing bytes. How often is that a problem for you in practice?