604372 - Why no HTML Special Characters display?

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[RMF Runyan]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/4.0; MathPlayer 2.10d; BTRS27068; Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) ; B4F-4.8.0.0-; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; Tablet PC 2.0; WWTClient2; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; OfficeLiveConnector.1.5; OfficeLivePatch.1.3; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; MSN Optimized;US)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.2.10) Gecko/20100914 BTRS27068 Firefox/3.6.10 ( .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET4.0E)

I would include cropped screen captures to show what this is about, but I cannot.  Basically, HTML Special Characters using the &xxx; format will not display in Firefox.  Why not?  The xxx is the name entity of the Special Character.  I never use the number equivalent because it is impossible to remember without a look up list.  Examples: ° ë Θ.  These Special Characters do display when using the Times New Roman font, but not when using the Verdana font.  They display fine in Internet Explorer using any font.  And I thought Firefox said it was the most W3C compliant browser.  BTW: the Special Characters also display fine in Opera using any font.  This is happening with files on my system unit.  I have yet to upload them onto a webserver.  I prefer to get the documents as complete as possible before uploading.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Put HTML Special Characters in a web page.
2. Use a CSS that defines the font as Verdana, Arial, sans-serif through a link tag.
3. Load page in Firefox
Actual Results:  
see above

Expected Results:  
Happens every time even using different pages.  At least it happens to me.  Also, just updated Firefox only two days ago (12 Oct 2010).  Thought this update might solve this problem, but evidently not.

Display the character instead of a black diamond with a white question mark in it.

Here is the about:buildconfig

about:buildconfig

Source

Built from http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-1.9.2/rev/16b7b02798df
Build platform
target
i686-pc-mingw32

Build tools
Compiler 	Version 	Compiler flags
cl 	14.00.50727.762 	-TC -nologo -W3 -Gy -Fdgenerated.pdb -DNDEBUG -DTRIMMED -Zi -UDEBUG -DNDEBUG -GL -wd4624 -wd4952 -O1
cl 	14.00.50727.762 	-GR- -TP -nologo -Zc:wchar_t- -W3 -Gy -Fdgenerated.pdb -DNDEBUG -DTRIMMED -Zi -UDEBUG -DNDEBUG -GL -wd4624 -wd4952 -O1

Configure arguments
--enable-application=browser --enable-update-channel=release --enable-update-packaging --enable-jemalloc --enable-official-branding --enable-tests

Comment 1

[RMF Runyan]

Attachment: Cropped screen capture of Firefox

Comment 2

[RMF Runyan]

Attachment: Cropped screen capture of Internet Explorer

Comment 3

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

we need a minimized testcase.
a short html file with 3-4 lines should be enough in this case.

Comment 4

[Jo Hermans]

What character set is used to display this (see View->Character Encoding) ? Note that this is a file on a local file system, so there's no webserver to assign an encoding.