There's nothing stopping you from leaving off the BOM as far as I know. The BOM is pointless in UTF-8 (the encoding is inherently endian-independent) and if you

There's nothing stopping you from leaving off the BOM as far as I know. The BOM is pointless in UTF-8 (the encoding is inherently endian-independent) and if you can guarantee by convention that your UTF-16 text will be read in the same byte order as it was written, you also don't need it. Another thing I noticed in the article: the encodings issue was historically even more complicated: Unicode previously only covered what is now the basic multilingual plane (BMP), which meant all code points could be encoded with a single 2-byte value, a.k.a. UCS-2. When more code points got added, that exceeded UCS-2's range, so that mutated into the variable-length UTF-16 encoding. Had Unicode been introduced into Windows and Java later, who knows if they'd ended up using UTF-16.