Unicode BOM as document separator [was: RE: [xml-dev] "Introducing MicroXML, Part 1: Explore the basic principles of ...]

David:

I'm not sure how important this is to your usage, but The Unicode 
Standard already defines the meaning of a Byte Order Mark (BOM) code 
point in the midst of data. Up until Unicode 3.2, the BOM code point 
U+FEFF had the Byte Order Mark semantics at the start of a text 
stream, and the Zero-Width Non-Breaking Space (ZWNBS) semantics 
within a text stream. As such, your "<data>" element could validly 
include a U+FEFF codoe point.

As of Unicode 3.2, the ZWNBS semantics for U+FEFF are deprecated, and 
a different code point U+2060 WORD JOINER is available. But the old 
use of ZWNBS will not have disappeared, and you might encounter it in 
the wild.

Reference:
http://unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html#bom6
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark#Usage

At 2:42 PM +0000 7/15/12, David Lee wrote:
...
>I had an "Ah Ha" Moment last week when I realized that the UTF8 BOM 
>could serve as such a separator.
...
>Then I realized that if I used BOM as a separator it might actually 
>work and plain XML parsers could read the degenerate case of 1 
>document.
>If every document started like
>BOM <data>
>BOM <data>
>
>Then by themselves they are valid XML documents
>If you concatenate them they become
>BOM <data> BOM <data>
>
>which a XDM Serialized capable parser could parse, and in some cases
>"dumb" parsers might just see this as 1 document and stop.

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