Re: [css-syntax] ISSUE-329: @charset has no effect on stylesheet??

Presumably the @charset continues to exist because there are situations 
where it's needed.

If the only conceivably situations are parsing of already existing 
stylesheets, then an argument that any change that affects the 
interpretation of any of these stylesheets is inherently risky and, in a 
strict sense would violate the backwards compatibility, does have some 
merit. (But remember, we are talking about making them behave as 
declared, not behave in an unusual new way.)

On the other hand, if there are any situations where someone needs to 
create new stylesheets that are not in UTF-8 (for whatever reason) and 
if the intent is to support newly created stylesheet that are not UTF-8 
in such cases, then having a syntax that is a "trap" is counter 
productive. Those for whom the support of new non-UTF-8 stylesheets is 
perpetuated would be likely to fail in correctly availing themselves of 
that feature, because they happen to fall into the trap.

If the intent is to force people to use UTF-8, then the way to do that 
would be to disregard the @charset declaration for any stylesheet that 
uses a feature not present in legacy stylesheets. That would be a clean 
solution.

Simply leaving a "gotcha" strikes me as suboptimal. It's not about 
"making it more convenient", but about making the process more robust, 
by separating the status of the feature (more or less deprecated) from 
accidents in syntax.

A./

Received on Thursday, 23 January 2014 17:33:09 UTC