CSS 2.1, white-space processing

Hi,
I would like to understand a bit more about the new white-space rules 
in CSS 2.1, http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-CSS21-20030915/text.html#q8. 
Is there some place i could read up a bit on the background of those?

I think that i would like to know more about how those relate to the 
rules of the document language as well as how they relate to Unicode.

For instance, why is the unicode escape "\A" special-treated in 
'content' strings, when it does not get parsed by the rules of the 
document language? It seems that CSS 2.1 sticks to the HTML concept 
of white-space and line-breaking-characters, but why? 

The replacement of line-feed characters is a script-dependant UA 
issue, and i think the actual line-break-opportunity is as well, so 
why is the level of detail at its current scope?  

Thanks in advance,
 /Staffan