RE: Character encoding in CSS

Thank you Chris.
I missed the part talking about @charset in the CSS2 specs. Therefore my
list of assumptions. Once @charset in place all goes as expected in
Netscape.

-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Lilley [mailto:chris@w3.org]
Sent: Thu, November 09, 2000 6:27 PM
To: Yves Savourel
Cc: www-international@w3.org
Subject: Re: Character encoding in CSS




> Yves Savourel wrote:

> Question: How to declare encoding for CSS file?
Since the MIME type for CSS is text/css you declare the encoding using the
unfortunately-named 'charst' parameter.

> Assumed Answer: You don't:

You can


> it will be treated as iso-8859-1

Did you try with alternative charset parameters? If you did not, and
transferred the stylesheet using HTTP, Netscape 6 was correct in assuming
8859-1.

> and all the
> meaningful characters (the ones in properties: font names, content,
> quotes, etc. as well as the one in identifiers (selectors, IDs, class
> names, etc.)) should always be coded with the \HHH mechanism. Comments
> can be in any 8-bit encodings you want: it's doesn't bother the
> processors.

No.

> Question: Can you have CSS files encoded in UTF-16?

Yes, no problem.

> Assumed Answer: No, or at least, it's not required from the CSS
> parsers to support it.

When you tried this, were your files correctly declared to be in UTF-16 or
did you just encode the file in UTF-16 and expect the CSS processor to
figure it out itself?

>
> Question: How CSS imported with an @import rule behave?
> Assumed Answer: Imported CSS are interpreted independently from the
> calling CSS, they could be in a different encoding, once parsed the text
> is in UCS regardless the original encoding.

Correct. Similarly, for external style sheets, the encoding of the XML file
is irrelevant.

--
Chris

Received on Saturday, 11 November 2000 10:08:40 UTC