Comment by 7bit

> The very fact that UTF-8 itself discouraged from using the BOM is just so alien to me.

Adding a BOM makes it incompatible with ASCII, which is one of the benefits of using UTF-8.

> The very fact that UTF-8 itself discouraged from using the BOM is just so alien to me.

One of the key advantages of UTF8 is that all ASCII content is effectively UTF-8. Having the BOM present reduces that convenience a bit, and a file starting with the three bytes 0xEF,0xBB,0xBF may be mistaken by some tools for a binary file rather than readable text.

> The US doesn't have any of these issues

I think you mean “the US chooses to completely ignore these issues and gets away with it because they defined the basic standard that is used, ASCII, way-back-when, and didn't foresee it becoming an international thing so didn't think about anyone else” :)

From wikipedia...

    UTF-8 always has the same byte order,[5] so its only use in UTF-8 is to signal at the start that the text stream is encoded in UTF-8...
    Not using a BOM allows text to be backwards-compatible with software designed for extended ASCII. For instance many programming languages permit non-ASCII bytes in string literals but not at the start of the file. ...
   A BOM is unnecessary for detecting UTF-8 encoding. UTF-8 is a sparse encoding: a large fraction of possible byte combinations do not result in valid UTF-8 text.

That last one is a weaker point but it is true that with CSV a BOM is more likely to do harm, than good.

Indeed, I've been using the BOM in all my text files for maybe decades now, those who wrote the recommendation are clearly from an English country