[SpaceManiac]

To be pedantic, the Unicode standard disrecommends the use of a BOM in UTF-8-encoded documents rather than declaring it invalid.

[kevin_thibedeau]

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.

[erik_seaberg]

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.