At the given example all text elements should be rendered with a sans-serif font, based on the classes "cptnrm" and "nrm" defined in http://www.carto.net/papers/svg/samples/styles_austria_2.css For correct rendering see f.e. Opera 9.1 or Batik. Thank you for having a look at it!
This isn't limited to SVG. This is a CSS parser "issue" http://paste.lisp.org/display/36137
moving to CSS, this is not an SVG bug.
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/fonts.html#propdef-font-family "Generic font family names are keywords, and therefore must not be quoted." Firefox follows the W3C, Opera apparently accepts them. We could support quoted generic families in quirks mode, but that wouldn't affect the SVG example case anyway. Recommend closing as INVALID.
ok, I agree that we shouldn't introduce quirks mode in SVG. I changed my example and removed the quotation marks in the CSS definitions. Thanks for pointing out the invalid use of the quotation marks. We can close this bug. Andreas