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

Answer 1

If you're putting a tag in your css files, you're doing something wrong. The 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.