Thanks for your insights. I did change my mind about the need for a BOM (though not about the need to be able to parse/skip it if present).

In a future where everything defaults to UTF-8 it makes sense. This is probably easier to envision in an English-only context where the jump from 7-bit ASCII to UTF-8 is cleaner.

Where I come from, UTF-8 is not always supported. Without a header (or "BOM", though we don't like the name) you don't know in what encoding a text file was meant to be (re-)saved as when it was created. My example of an empty file was meant to illustrate that. But leaning on the Utopian side, I too shall put more energy towards all apps supporting UTF-8 :)