Guessing the encoding from a BOM

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, Jan 18, 2014 at 3:30 AM, Rustom Mody <rustompmody at gmail.com> wrote:
> If you or I break a standard then, well, we broke a standard.
> If Microsoft breaks a standard the standard is obliged to change.
>
> Or as the saying goes, everyone is equal though some are more equal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/800_pound_gorilla

Though Microsoft has been losing weight over the past decade or so,
just as IBM before them had done (there was a time when IBM was *the*
800lb gorilla, pretty much, but definitely not now). In Unix/POSIX
contexts, Linux might be playing that role - I've seen code that
unwittingly assumes Linux more often than, say, assuming FreeBSD - but
I haven't seen a huge amount of "the standard has to change, Linux
does it differently", possibly because the areas of Linux-assumption
are areas that aren't standardized anyway (eg additional socket
options beyond the spec).

The one area where industry leaders still heavily dictate to standards
is the web. Fortunately, it usually still results in usable standards
documents that HTML authors can rely on. Usually. *twiddles fingers*

ChrisA