RFC 2318 (rfc2318) - Page 2 of 5
The text/css Media Type
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 2318 text/css Media Type March 1998
(1) external - the style sheet is linked to a document through a
URI and exists as a separate object on the Web. The media type
text/css is used when fetching the object, for example in the
Content-Type and Accept header fields of HTTP [2].
(2) internal - the style sheet is contained within the document. A
typical scenario is an HTML [3] document that contains a style
sheet within the STYLE element. Due to this close relationship,
HTML and CSS share the same top-level name ("text").
4. Registration Information
To:
Subject: Registration of MIME media type text/css
MIME media type name: text
MIME subtype name: css
Required parameters: none
Optional parameters: charset
The syntax of CSS is expressed in US-ASCII, but a CSS file can
contain strings which may use any Unicode character. Any charset
that is a superset of US-ASCII may be used; US-ASCII, iso-8859-X
and utf-8 are recommended.
Encoding considerations:
For use with transports that are not 8-bit clean, quoted-
printable encoding is recommended since the majority of
characters will be CSS syntax and thus US-ASCII
Security considerations:
Applying a style sheet to a document may hide information
otherwise visible. For example, a very small font size may be
specified, or the display of certain document elements may be
turned off.
CSS style sheets consist of declarative property/value pairs
assigned to element selectors. They contain no executable code.
As with HTML documents, CSS style sheets may contain links to
other media (images, sounds, fonts, other style sheets) and those
links are typically followed automatically by software, resulting
Lie, et. al. Informational