Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Escapes in CSS

It may be necessary to escape a character in a style sheet if the value of a property contains a non-ASCII character. In CSS, the escape mechanism is a backslash followed by the hexadecimal Unicode code point value. The escape is terminated with a space instead of a semicolon. For example, a font name starting with a capital letter C with a cedilla (Ç) needs to be escaped in the style rule, as shown here.

    p { font-family: \C7 elikfont; }

When the special character appears in a style attribute value, it is possible to use its NCR, entity, or CSS escape. The CSS escape is recommended to make it easier to move it to a style sheet later.

Tip

For guidelines on declaring character encodings and using escapes, see the W3C’s Authoring Techniques for XHTML & HTML Internationalization available at http://www.w3.org/TR/i18n-html-tech-char/.