RE: [CSS21] Required charset support

Justin,

Strictly speaking "@charset" must be the *very* first characters in a style
sheet.  The only exception is an optional 2-byte Byte Order Mark (BOM) which
can immediately precede the "@charset" rule.

The expectation that the characters '@', 'a', 'c', 'e', 'h', 'r', 's', and
't' are decodable (whether or not the UA knows the byte order of the style
sheet) is spelled out in the last paragraph of section 4.4, "CSS style sheet
representation." [1]

My question regards whether or not a UA is required to support UTF-8 encoded
style sheets or not.  It seems a conforming UA must be capable of
interpreting a UTF-8 byte stream in order to satisfy the fifth rule in
section 4.4.

-MM

[1] http://localhost/css-test/css1test42b.xhtml


> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-style-request@w3.org [mailto:www-style-request@w3.org] On Behalf
> Of Justin Wood
> Sent: Wednesday, July 14, 2004 9:25 PM
> To: W3C Style List
> Subject: Re: [CSS21] Required charset support
> 
[snip]
> I remember reading somewhere A CSS parser must be able to parse the
> content in a 'normal' charset up until the first reading of a @charset
> rule (or that may have been in HTML 4.01, but I thought I read it in CSS
> as well).
> 
> which seems correct, you can also specify charset via http-headers,
> which may have been the intent.
> 
> ~Justin Wood