Why specify charset UTF-8 in your CSS file

Question

I ve been seeing this instruction as the very first line of numerous CSS files that have been turned over to me    charset  UTF-8     What does it do  and is this at-rule necessary     Also  if I include this meta tag in my  head  element  would that eliminate the need to have it also present within my CSS files    lt meta http-equiv  Content-Type  content  text html charset UTF-8  gt

User · Accepted Answer

It tells the browser to read the css file as UTF-8. This is handy if your CSS contains unicode characters and not only ASCII.

Using it in the meta tag is fine, but only for pages that include that meta tag.

Read about the rules for character set resolution of CSS files at the w3c spec for CSS 2.

User · Answer

If you re putting a  lt meta gt  tag in your css files  you re doing something wrong  The  lt meta gt  tag belongs in your html files  and tells the browser how the html is encoded  it doesn t say anything about the css  which is a separate file  You could conceivably have completely different encodings for your html and css  although I can t imagine this would be a good idea

User · Answer

One reason to always include a character set specification on every page containing text is to avoid cross site scripting vulnerabilities  In most cases the UTF-8 character set is the best choice for text  including HTML pages

User · Answer

This is useful in contexts where the encoding is not told per HTTP header or other meta data  e g  the local file system   Imagine the following stylesheet    rel  external    after       content            If a reader saves the file to a hard drive and you omit the  charset rule  most browsers will read it in the OS    locale encoding  e g  Windows-1252  and insert          instead of an arrow   Unfortunately  you cannot rely on this mechanism as the support is rather     rare  And remember that on the net an HTTP header will always override the  charset rule   The correct rules to determine the character set of a stylesheet are in order of priority    HTTP Charset header  Byte Order Mark  The first  charset rule  UTF-8     The last rule is the weakest  it will fail in some browsers  The charset attribute in  lt link rel  stylesheet  charset  utf-8  gt  is obsolete in HTML 5  Watch out for conflict between the different declarations  They are not easy to debug   Recommended reading   Russ Rolfe  Declaring character encodings in CSS IANA  Official names for character sets     other names are not allowed  use the preferred name for  charset if more than one name is registered for the same encoding  MDN   charset  There is a support table  I do not trust this     Test case from the CSS WG

[css] Why specify @charset "UTF-8"; in your CSS file?

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