For those who haven't yet had enough of this debate yet, here's a link to an informative blog (with some informative comments) from Michael Kaplan:
"Every character has a story #4: U+feff (alternate title: UTF-8 is the BOM, dude!)" http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2005/01/20/357028.aspx What should be interesting is that this blog dates to January 2005, seven and a half years ago, and yet includes the following: "But every 4-6 months another huge thread on the Unicode List gets started about how bad the BOM is for UTF-8 and how it breaks UNIX tools that have been around and able to support UTF-8 without change for decades and about how Microsoft is evil for shipping Notepad that causes all of these problems and how neither the W3C nor Unicode would have ever supported a UTF-8 BOM if Microsoft did not have Notepad doing it, and so on, and so on." And here we are again. -- Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA http://www.ewellic.org | @DougEwell