I18N-ISSUE-307: Decoding (character encoding) instructions general observations [.prep-css3-syntax]

I18N-ISSUE-307: Decoding (character encoding) instructions general observations [.prep-css3-syntax]

http://www.w3.org/International/track/issues/307

Raised by: Addison Phillips
On product: .prep-css3-syntax

http://www.w3.org/TR/css-syntax-3/#input-byte-stream

The instructions in this section raise these questions for me:

1. Step 2 includes instructions for decoding @charset. Later on there is a note that says:

"the decode algorithm lets the byte order mark (BOM) take precedence, hence the usage of the term "fallback" above."

These are at odds with one another. The first few bytes in the file cannot be the ones described in Step 2 if there is a byte order mark present. Why isn't BOM handling considered to be "Step 2"?

2. Various places (notably the section on the @charset rule) imply that whitespace may precede the @charset, but Step 2 does not allow for ASCII whitespace to be disregarded in finding the @charset token.

3. The note "Anything ASCII-compatible will do, so using windows-1252 is fine" is not a clear enough indicator that ONLY ASCII-compatible encodings are accepted for style sheets. There should be a direct statement about this.

There is also mention in the section on the @charset rule that the byte sequence will "spell out something else entirely" if the character encoding isn't ASCII-compatible. Perhaps the text should be explicit: the only non-ASCII-compatible encodings that can be used for a CSS stylesheet are UTF-16 and its endian friends LE and BE.

Received on Wednesday, 6 November 2013 18:17:42 UTC