Does a font family with a period in it need apos around it?

I'm trying to figure out whether Adobe SVGViewer or Apache Batik has a bug with
the handling of font family names. I'm hoping someone here can say whether
a font family name with a period in it (eg sansserif.italic) should be 
quoted by apostrophes. 

I have an SVG file output by Batik that the Batik Viewer can view but that the
Adobe SVG Viewer can't view.

It appeas that Adobe's SVGViewer considers this line to be bad because of the .italic as part of the 
font family name:

        <font-face ascent="100.52667" descent="21.970367" units-per-em="100" style="font-
family:sansserif.italic; font-style:italic; font-weight:normal;" />

Changing to 
   font-family:sansserif; 
 removes the bad CSS error that SVGViewer reports as an IE plug-in:
     bad CSS property or descriptor declaration

I noticed something else too. There were three occurrences of sansserif.italic. The later 2 were in 
text tags:

<text x="227.9677734375" y="254.92665100097656" style="font-size:12; font-family:
&apos;sansserif.italic&apos;; font-style:italic; stroke:none;">

Note that they have the ampersand apostrophes around them. So then I changed the font-face font-
family attribute to have the ampersand apostrophe

        <font-face ascent="100.52667" descent="21.970367" units-per-em="100" style="font-family:
&apos;sansserif.italic&apos;; font-style:italic; font-weight:normal;" />

Now SVGViewer no longer generates an error message about this SVG file.

So is it a bug in Batik for the font-face font-family to not put the apos chars around a font family that 
has a dot in the middle of it? Or is it a bug in Adobe SVG Viewer?

Some relevant links to the specs. They don't say precisely enough what are legal
font family names and when the font family names have to be quoted. They talk about white space. 
But since period is not white space then is the apos not needed?

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/fonts.html#propdef-font-family

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/syndata.html#whitespace

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/fonts.html#generic-font-families