UTF-8 encoding and BOM
I'm reading in a file that's encoded in UTF-8 and begins with the byte-order mark of EF BB BF. I'm curious to know why a byte-order mark is needed for something encoded in UTF-8, because aren't BOMs only used to figure out endianness, which isn't an issue with UTF-8 as some tutorials I've seen say. But then again, UTF-8 can use multiple bytes to specify a character, in which case endianness does matter, right?
My question is therefore whether endianness matters with UTF-8?
Also, at the online converter at the URL http://macchiato.com/unicode/convert.html, why can you convert from FE FF in UTF-16 to EF BB BF in UTF-8, but cannot do the conversion in the opposite way? Is it a problem with the converter, or something to do with the encodings themselves?
Thanks.
