273075 - Default character encoding always unicode

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Manuel C.]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

Even if I set the default character encoding to Western, when a website doesn't
have the encoding specified, the Character encoding is always Unicode.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Options -> Languages -> Default character encoding -> Western (ISO-8859-1)
2. Go to any website which doesn't mention the encoding


Actual Results:  
In view -> Character Encoding -> the 'Unicode' option will always be checked. 

Expected Results:  
In view -> Character Encoding -> Western (ISO-8859-1) checked instead of Unicode

It only happened since recently...

Comment 1

[jeps]

With our application this happens when the user submits a form by post method 
from a page using utf-8 encoding to a second page that does not specify any 
encoding. The second page "inherits" the encoding from the first page. 

The second page correctly uses the default encoding if the user navigates to it 
using a href.

Comment 2

[jeps]

Attachment: html and htaccess files for apache 2 to reproduce bug

Steps to reproduce:

0. unzip test.zip attachment to apache 2 web server's htdocs folder

1. navigate to /test/
- page encoding is iso-8859-1, special chars ok

2. click /test/utf-8/
- page encoding is utf-8, special chars ok

3. click /test/
- this is the same page as in step 1.
- page encoding is now utf-8, all special chars are replaced by '?'

Comment 3

[mashenka]

When I use  Character encoding Armenian (ARMSCII–8) on a site, it works fine
until I change a page on that same site. Than the page goes back to either
unicode or western or user defined. 

Every time I change a page I need to go View character encoding chose the
encoding I want to use each time … which becomes very frustrating… 

it’s great to have it which other browsers don’t have this specific encoding but
it does have some problems to it… I would like to use it as a default so I won’t
need to repeat the steps each time. 

How can it be resolved? 

Comment 4

[Vahe Khachikyan]

(In reply to comment #3)
> When I use  Character encoding Armenian (ARMSCII�8) on a site, it works fine
> until I change a page on that same site. Than the page goes back to either
> unicode or western or user defined. 
 
This is not a Browser problem, but rather a Web Designer problem!
Web designers forget to specify the correct character encoding for the 
site or even some of them specify User-Defined as character encoding. 

If no character encoding is  specified, with either Content-Type: ^HTTP^ header
or with META ^HTML^ header, then the browser falls back to some predefined, or
user specified character encoding.

Nevertheless there is also a problem with some sites that either specify
user-defined as encoding or use ISO-8859-1 and specify ARMSCII-8 fonts with styles. 

In case of setting the encoding to user-defined the authors rely on user having
set up the desired fonts for user-defined encoding (in this case some ARMSCII-8
fonts). 

In case of ISO-8859-1 it is just a poor violation of all known standarts :-) and
 the web authors rely on user having installed a correct fonts. 

This all trickery is needed for IE which doesn't support ARMSCII-8 at all. The
correct solution for the sites that should be inter browser compatible would be
to use some mechanism of determining the browser used and dynamically change the
encoding, setting it (in HTTP headers or META headers) to ARMSCII-8 in case of
Mozilla deriviates.

Comment 5

[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:
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Comment 6

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.