[dbaron revision history] Add wording from HTML. Probably needs to be incorporated better. Per April 7 telecon. (date: 2003/04/07 16:30:50)

Author: dbaron

css3-syntax/Overview.src.html

@@ -150,7 +150,16 @@ <h2>CSS style sheet representation</h2>
 <ol>
 <li>A character set specified by a higher level protocol (e.g., the
 "charset" parameter to the MIME type specified in an HTTP "Content-Type"
-field).</li>
+field).
+(The HTTP protocol ([[RFC2616]], section 3.7.1) mentions ISO-8859-1 as a
+default character encoding when the "charset" parameter is absent from
+the "Content-Type" header field. In practice, this recommendation has
+proved useless because some servers don't allow a "charset" parameter to
+be sent, and others may not be configured to send the parameter.
+Therefore, user agents must not assume any default value for the
+"charset" parameter, but must instead look for the <span
+class="index-inst" title="@charset">@charset</span> rule.)
+</li>
 <li>The <span class="index-def" title="@charset">@charset</span>
 at-rule.</li>
 <li>Assume that the stylesheet is UTF-8.</li>