384485 - UTF-8 encoding used when a new document is created in composer even if ISO-8859-1 is reported in HTML

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 369392

(SeaMonkey :: Composer, defect)

Description

[brian.dam.pedersen]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; da; rv:1.8.0.12) Gecko/20070508 Firefox/1.5.0.12
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; da; rv:1.8.0.12) Gecko/20070508 Firefox/1.5.0.12

When a new composer window is opened UTF-8 is default, but ISO-8859-1 is reported in the HTML source as the character set. This means that international characters display incorrectly in e.g. Safari. The preferred solution would be to have ISO-8859-1 be default in the editor or at least have the editor report the correct charset in the HTML.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create new document
2. Type international characters (e.g. æøå or ü)
3. look in source
Actual Results:  
the UTF-8 representation is there, but character set is reported as ISO-8859-1, making the result look garbeled in e.g. Safari

Expected Results:  
Either change default encoding in the editor to ISO-8859-1 (preferred as this means that source is editable in a normal text editor such as emacs) or report UTF-8 as the (correct) charset (this fixes the display issue for at least Safari).

Comment 1

[Petr Hroudný]

I'd definitely vote for reporting UTF-8 in HTML source. Legacy charsets like ISO-8859-1 should be deprecated in user interfaces as soon as possible.
On the territory of European Union, more than 10 legacy codepages are in use today and this is nothing else than a big mess.

As for editing the files in normal text editor, there's absolutely no problem to edit UTF-8 files this way - you just need UTF-8 capable editor.