If the first byte of a character in the UTF-8 charset starts with a hexadecimal value between E0 and EF, then the character consists of three bytes.

So, both the å, the space and the asterisk would be part of a single character…

@charset is supported by at least Gecko, Opera and recent WebKit builds, and it seems IE6 supports it too, actually.

I had heard of the @charset rule but didn’t think there where any browser support for it. Is there?

This blog is more practical than adhearing to specifications :) Good comment, and thanks for pointing out my errors.

I believe there are two fundamental mistakes in your article. First of all, this is not a bug and secondly, there are two ways to specify the encoding of an css stylesheet.

Let me explain. Western character encodings use a single byte for each character. UTF-8 uses multiple bytes. Some characters use a single byte, other two or three. The first byte of such a doublet or triplet is an indication of how many bytes that particular character is using.

When you use the å character in one of the ISO-8859 encodings it will use the same byte value as the first byte in one of those UTF-8 multibyte characters.

So IE treats the å as the start of a multibyte character. The next bytes are part of the same character. Now, if that next byte is the asterisk of the comment closing marker it will break the marker and the comment will simply never end. For example /*å*/ will become something like this: /*?/. The questionmark represents one multibyte UTF-8 character.

So, this is normal behavoir and certainly not a bug. IE just parses the stylesheet as instructed.

Secondly. There are two ways to specify the charset encoding of the stylesheet. First of all you can configure the server to tell the browser by using HTTP headers, or you could use the @charset “at-rule”. For example, start your css file with: @charset “UTF-8″;