When is a first letter not a :first-letter?

The section on "The :first-letter pseudo-element" at 
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/selector.html#x53 and parallel sections in 
other CSS versions nowhere specifies whether there is any restriction 
on which characters can be selected by :first-letter, or in other words, 
what is the definition of "letter" for the purposes of this section.

It does specify that the ':first-letter' also applies if the first 
letter is in fact a digit, e.g., the "6" in "67 million dollars is a lot 
of money.", and to me this seems to imply that it does not apply if the 
first character is neither a digit nor a letter, e.g. the "$" in 
"$67,000,000 is a lot of money". It would be clearer if this was defined 
explicitly in terms of Unicode character classes, as with punctuation in 
the previous paragraph.

In practice, user agents seem to apply :first-letter to either the first 
  character (plus leading punctuation) regardless of character class, or 
in the worst case to the first UTF-16 code unit.

Received on Friday, 27 June 2008 15:55:59 UTC