Re: @charset rule

François Patte wrote:

Bonjour,

I am wondering why the @charset rule is not working for me.

I put at the early beginning of my index.css file:

@charset "utf-8";

no line before....

and in every html file:

link rel="STYLESHEET" href="index.css"

Everything is OK for all style definitions made in the index.css
(background, fonts style, size, and so on....

Only the charset definition is not working.... Browsers always return
ISO8859-1!!!

The @charset rule specifies only the encoding of the stylesheet. It
doesn't specify the encoding of the web page that links to the
stylesheet. It can't--the page's content can be completely processed and
the document model completely built in memory by the time the stylesheet
gets to the browser.

Harlan Messinger a écrit :

François Patte wrote:
Bonjour,

I am wondering why the @charset rule is not working for me.

I put at the early beginning of my index.css file:

@charset "utf-8";

no line before....

and in every html file:

link rel="STYLESHEET" href="index.css"

Everything is OK for all style definitions made in the index.css
(background, fonts style, size, and so on....

Only the charset definition is not working.... Browsers always return
ISO8859-1!!!

The @charset rule specifies only the encoding of the stylesheet. It
doesn't specify the encoding of the web page that links to the
stylesheet. It can't--the page's content can be completely processed and
the document model completely built in memory by the time the stylesheet
gets to the browser.

Thanks to all. I did not understand that this declaration was limited to
the css file only...

And now I don't understand why it is necessary to declare the charset of
the css file.

--
François Patte
Université Paris 5 - Paris

François Patte wrote:

Harlan Messinger a écrit :
François Patte wrote:
Bonjour,

I am wondering why the @charset rule is not working for me.

I put at the early beginning of my index.css file:

@charset "utf-8";

no line before....

and in every html file:

link rel="STYLESHEET" href="index.css"

Everything is OK for all style definitions made in the index.css
(background, fonts style, size, and so on....

Only the charset definition is not working.... Browsers always return
ISO8859-1!!!
The @charset rule specifies only the encoding of the stylesheet. It
doesn't specify the encoding of the web page that links to the
stylesheet. It can't--the page's content can be completely processed and
the document model completely built in memory by the time the stylesheet
gets to the browser.

Thanks to all. I did not understand that this declaration was limited to
the css file only...

And now I don't understand why it is necessary to declare the charset of
the css file.

It *isn't* necessary unless (a) the server isn't sending a charset
parameter in a Content-Type header (because if the server is sending
one, then the @charset rule will be ignored anyway) and (b) the wrong
encoding would be applied following application of items 3 through 5
below, in order by priority from highest to lowest.

[Steps for determining the encoding of an external CSS sheet, from
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/syndata.html#charset]

1. An HTTP "charset" parameter in a "Content-Type" field (or similar
parameters in other protocols)
2. BOM and/or @charset (see below)
3. <link charset=""> or other metadata from the linking mechanism
(if any)
4. charset of referring style sheet or document (if any)
5. Assume UTF-8

Scripsit François Patte:

I did not understand that this declaration was limited
to the css file only...

That's not surprising; virtually all people get very confused with charset
issues when they start working with them, but we can learn to keep the
confusion at a manageable level.

And now I don't understand why it is necessary to declare the charset
of the css file.

Mostly it isn't. You normally use just ASCII characters there, and then the
charset mostly does not matter.

It matters if you use, say, a font name containing non-ASCII characters,
like

body { font-family: "François", sans-serif; }

(just assuming that you expect a font called "François" to exist somewhere).
People have used e.g. font names containing Japanese characters.

If this still puzzles you, c.i.w.a.stylesheets would be the right group to
ask about CSS issues.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Jukka K. Korpela a écrit :

Scripsit François Patte:

I did not understand that this declaration was limited
to the css file only...

That's not surprising; virtually all people get very confused with
charset issues when they start working with them, but we can learn to
keep the confusion at a manageable level.

And now I don't understand why it is necessary to declare the charset
of the css file.

Mostly it isn't. You normally use just ASCII characters there, and then
the charset mostly does not matter.

It matters if you use, say, a font name containing non-ASCII characters,
like

body { font-family: "François", sans-serif; }

(just assuming that you expect a font called "François" to exist
somewhere). People have used e.g. font names containing Japanese
characters.

If this still puzzles you, c.i.w.a.stylesheets would be the right group
to ask about CSS issues.

Thanks for this clarification and for the address.

--
François Patte
Université Paris 5 - Paris

On Sat, 6 Oct 2007, François Patte wrote:

And now I don't understand why it is necessary to declare the charset of
the css file.

It is necessary when you want to include some special, non-ASCII
characters - perhaps in comments or a byte order mark.
http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/bom.css

On 2007-10-08, Andreas Prilop <aprilop2007 (AT) trashmail (DOT) net> wrote:

On Sat, 6 Oct 2007, François Patte wrote:

And now I don't understand why it is necessary to declare the charset of
the css file.

It is necessary when you want to include some special, non-ASCII
characters - perhaps in comments or a byte order mark.
http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/bom.css

Also for values of the content or quotes properties. The latter would be
particularly likely to contain non-ASCII (although I don't think quotes
is much supported).

Andreas Prilop wrote:

On Sat, 6 Oct 2007, François Patte wrote:

And now I don't understand why it is necessary to declare the charset of
the css file.

It is necessary when you want to include some special, non-ASCII
characters [...]

*Only* if you fail to provide another lower level specification of the
character map.
With HTTP, it's much better to use the Content-Type header.
The charset directive is a ugly hack that works well for ASCII-compatible
character maps when the character map of the CSS document isn't given to
the processing tool.

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