285324 - javascript popups ignore character set of script, opening page, and meta tags

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Core :: DOM: Core & HTML, defect)

Description

[Douglas Bagnall]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20050105 Debian/1.7.5-1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20050105 Debian/1.7.5-1

When a script in a utf-8 page opens a pop-up window and writes to it, the opened
window is iso-8859-1.  It should be utf-8, or at least be subject to javascript
manipulation.  There is nothing to suggest it should be ISO-8859-1.

MSIE apparently has a read/write window.charset property.  mozilla's
window.characterSet is read only.  Having it setable, at least on an empty
document, would be a solution.  Resetting the character set midway through a
document is not novel -- meta tags can do it.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. open a pop-up window with javascript, not populating it with an url.
2. with javascript, put non-iso-8859-1 text into it.
3. observe.
4. alternatively, visit http://halo.gen.nz/mozilla/popup-test.html

Actual Results:  
popped up window's document's character set is ISO-8859-1

Expected Results:  
popped up window's document's character set is UTF-8

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

The data you're writing to the popup is not actually UTF-8, it's UCS-2 (because
all strings in JavaScript are UCS-2 strings).

The real question is what difference it makes what the document character set is
set to in this case, given that none of the data is converted from bytes using
the document character set.  Do you have a usecase where this matters?

Comment 2

[Douglas Bagnall]

> Do you have a usecase where this matters?

Not really, it turns out -- My problem was with forms, but the accept-charset
attribute solves the problem.

These two test pages show the difference:

http://halo.gen.nz/mozilla/popup-test-default.html
http://halo.gen.nz/mozilla/popup-test-utf-8.html

I still think this is a (very minor) bug, but I don't think anyone one 
ought to prioritise it. Feel free to resolve it WONTFIX or something.

Comment 3

[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
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you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
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If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
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Thank you for your help in this matter.

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Comment 4

[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.