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http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/infrastructure.html#a-utf-16-encoding says: "The term a UTF-16 encoding refers to any variant of UTF-16: self-describing UTF-16 with a BOM, ambiguous UTF-16 without a BOM, raw UTF-16LE, and raw UTF-16BE. [RFC2781]" What is 'raw' UTF-16LE/LE ? Presumably, it's 'ambiguous UTF-16' without a BOM but with an encoding declaration in the transport layer? Actually 'self-describing' is not completely unambiguous either. Please clarify what these words mean.
Would it be better to replace the reference on this sentence with an [ENCODING] reference and just point to UTF-16LE and UTF-16BE? Something like this: "The term a UTF-16 encoding refers to any variant of UTF-16: UTF-16LE or UTF-16BE with or without BOM. [ENCODING]"
You could say that it refers to either utf-16le or utf-16be and that's it. No need to mention BOM and such per Encoding anyway.
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the Editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the Tracker Issue; or you may create a Tracker Issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document: http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html Status: Accepted Change Description: Applied change from the WHATWG spec which [should] resolve. See checkin (5.1 Nightly): https://github.com/w3c/html/commit/c50f7280a75b26ea779a22a1c908df3afa8c09e7 See checkin (CR draft): https://github.com/w3c/html/commit/8b67cf8f28edb2e207b621e49c8e4ed62f7363f9