202446 - Using requested character instead of a metacharacter

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 174216

(SeaMonkey :: Composer, enhancement)

Description

[Alain Martel]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030312
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030312

When creating or editing an html document in a non-english language, the special
and accentuated characters are converted into metacharacters. A decent browser
acn easily display chars like: à é è ê ç â ä û ÿ ì  directly. Netscape 3 could,
Mozilla can, msie can. Forcing the use of many metachar only make the document
bigger without improving compatibility noticably.
My proposition is to make the use of metacharacters optional when a standard ISO
character can be used instead. Default should be NOT to convert to meta.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Christopher Hoess (gone)]

By "metacharacter" do you mean "character entity"?

Comment 2

[Alain Martel]

I mean those: é à â ä ç ê è
replacing é à â ä ç ê è respectively.
All the browsers I have tested to date can display them without replacement

Comment 3

[Martijn Voncken]

I'm bot a mozilla developer but....

Characters like à é è ê ç â ä û ÿ ì are character-set/code-page dependent.
You do know the problems with the euro sign? € <-this should be a euro sign.
All those special characters have that problem too, just not that often....
They may look fine in your browser,but they are not portable.
I's not just the browser, it's allso the OS/installed fonts.
Any decent browser is not good enough for me.

Comment 4

[Kathleen :Brade]

-->future

Comment 5

[Gérard Talbot]

> Characters like à é è ê ç â ä û ÿ ì are character-set/code-page dependent.

Exactly. When you change character set, then accentuated characters and special
signs are no longer rendered or are not rendered the same but named character
entities references (é à â ä ç ê è)
or numeric character entity references (é à â ä ç
ê è) will be rendered as expected.

I recommend resolving as WONTFIX

Comment 6

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 7

[Gérard Talbot]

I'm now convince this should be an enhancement request. For sure, this bug meets
the expected results and bug description of bug 174216. Resolving as such.


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 174216 ***

Comment 8

[Gérard Talbot]

Alain, I forgot to mention this. You can create your own fix for this bug. Do
the following:

1- Create a new plain text file
2- Edit in it this:
user_pref("editor.encode_entity", "basic")
3- Name that file 
user.js
4- Save it into your profile. E.g. in XP:
C:\Documents and Settings\[os-profile]\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\[Your
Seamonkey Profile]\[bunch of numbers+letters.slt

and then accentuated letters type in Normal or HTML Tags will remain as such in
HTML source view and vice versa.