Hector Martin

@YouTube devs who did this should be required to attend a talk with @rob_pike about the byte order fallacy on UTF-8 If Rob Pike saw this quickly he would run to prepare his lemon pie recipe just to forget it quickly...

BOM is very important to UTF-8, but mostly in unambiguously identifying a file as NOT being UTF-8. #NeverFFEForget [Although there are *rare* cases where you can't easily specify an encoding, like remotely hosted css/js files, and a UTF-8 BOM will correctly identify it.]

Again, BOM in UTF-8 content is useless... byte order for just one byte encoding?? We are no talking about UTF-16

The UTF-8 BOM isn't about byte order, it's a magic number for UTF-8 data. We just call it a BOM because that codepoint also serves to distinguish UTF-16LE and UTF-16BE.