Nobu Nakada:

> BOM(byte order mark) sounds nonsense in UTF-8, one of multibyte
> encoding. :)

   While it does sound like a nonsense, the sequence of bytes [0xEF, 0xBB,
0xBF] which is the UTF-8 rendering of the BOM character U+FEFF is often used
to identify files as UTF-8.

http://www.unicode.org/unicode/faq/utf_bom.html#25

   Neil