[CSS21] BOM & @charset (issues 44 & 115)

As I wrote in the response to issues 115 and 44, CSS 2.1 will allow a
BOM (Byte Order Mark) to occur in an external style sheet and UAs can
use it (1) to determine the byte ordering if they know the encoding but
not the byte order, and (2) determine the encoding itself, if there is
no more authoritative source for it (in particular HTTP headers).

So the list of places to look for encoding info was as follows:

   1. HTTP header
   2. @charset
   3. BOM
   4. etc.

But some people pointed out that the BOM, if present, comes before the
@charset, so in fact you always have to check it first. It seems
therefore, that the order of (2) and (3) in the list doesn't matter.
And thus, we want to change it to:

   1. HTTP header
   2. BOM
   3. @charset
   4. etc.

But this is complicated material, so: does anybody see a problem with
this? There doesn't seem to be an encoding in which the "@" looks like
the BOM of some other encoding. Did we overlook anything?



Bert
-- 
  Bert Bos                                ( W 3 C ) http://www.w3.org/
  http://www.w3.org/people/bos/                              W3C/ERCIM
  bert@w3.org                             2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
  +33 (0)4 92 38 76 92            06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Tuesday, 17 February 2004 16:38:50 UTC