What are you talking about? The BOM and UTF-16 go hand-and-hand. Without a Byte Order Mark, you can't unambiguosly determine whether big or little endian UTF-16 was used.
In the old days, UCS-2 was *implicitly* big-endian. It was only when Microsoft got that wrong that little-endian version of UCS-2 came along. So while the BOM is now part of all relevant specifications, it is still "Microsoft crap".
For more details, see: http://www.unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html#BOM
"some higher level protocols", "can be useful" - not "is inherent part of all byte-level encodings".
Regards, Martin -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
