226945 - textarea does not print out non-breaking space ("nbsp;) entities

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: DOM: HTML Parser, defect)

Description

[Nick C]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 Firebird/0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 Firebird/0.7

non-breaking spaces ("nbsp;) coded inside textarea tags do not appear in
their full entity form in the browser, but just as normal whitespaces...

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
displayed whitespaces

Expected Results:  
display the fill "nbsp; entity within the textarea

Comment 1

[Nick C]

Attachment: example of behaviour

Comment 2

[Nick C]

this is inconvenient because when a form containing such a textarea is
submitted, the html entities are ignored and converted to whitespaces, which is
in most cases not the desired behaviour - especially when it comes to DB data etc...

Comment 3

[Anne (:annevk)]

This is INVALID.

If you want to display " " you should encode it as " ", it will
show up then.

Comment 4

[Mike Kowalski]

v

Comment 5

[Nick C]

Consider the following use case:

* user edits HTML content via a textarea, for example for blogging. He wants
precise spacing for some of the text he is writing so he uses  
* user submits the form, the data gets stored in the database, and displays fine.
* user decides to edit his post, makes some changes, resubmits the form, and hey
presto! his layout is broken.

This is because the   tags in the databases got converted to
whitespaces in the textarea when the user edited his content, and therefor got
saved to the database as whitespaces as well.

The w3c defines TEXTAREA's content as being PCDATA, which from what I understand
allows entities (as well as markup, curiously enough). So, whilst all entities
contained in CDATA (eg attributes etc) fields should indeed be converted to
plain chars, there's doesn't actually seem to be any reason for doing this for
PCDATA - it seems to me that Moz should allow all entities (not just
& ) to pass through to the user in the textarea content.

I just thought I'd point it out - not make or break, it just seemed to me to be
slightly inconsistent behaviour.

Comment 6

[Blake Kaplan (:mrbkap) (inactive)]

Entities should be expanded in PCDATA (as far as I can find). This is still
INVALID. You're going to have to fix this on the web app's side (e.g., do extra
processing on the data in the database or something like that).

Comment 7

[Adrien Beau]

This bug is probably a consequence of bug #194498.