There are already plenty of cases that valid UTF-8 readers have to deal with (unused ranges of code points, invalid byte combinations, etc.). Ignoring a BOM is

There are already plenty of cases that valid UTF-8 readers have to deal with (unused ranges of code points, invalid byte combinations, etc.). Ignoring a BOM is trivial by comparison. A UTF-8 reader honestly doesn't care about the "stringness" of a .txt file because of all the other crap that can be in a byte stream. Older programs do care, but as I've said elsewhere in the thread an ASCII file can remain ASCII (no BOM). There's no reason to BOM-ify an old ASCII file if it really is ASCII and only ASCII-expecting programs will ever use it. Over time these old programs will either be upgraded or go away and it will finally be safe to say that inputs must be UTF-8. At that time, the BOM has no reason to exist.