63480 - Mnemonic character references output by Editor don't work in Nav 4.x

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Core :: DOM: Editor, defect)

Description

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

Build ID: proper id missing, from 2000-12-05

Reproducible: Always

Steps to reproduce:
1) Open a new document in Editor
2) Type in some typographically correct quotation marks and dashes. (On the Mac U.S. 
keyboard: option-[, option-], option-shift-[, option-shift-], option--, option-shift--)
3) Save the document and open it in Netscape Communicator 4.6 or 4.7x.
4) Take a look.
5) Open the document in a text editor and replace the mnemonic character references 
with the corresponding numeric (decimal) references according to 
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html#h-24.4
6) Reload the document in Nav 4.x
7) Take a look again.

Actual results:
The mnemonic references don't work in Nav 4.x due to the brokenness of Nav 4.x. 
However, the numeric references do work.

Expected results:
Expected Editor to output more compatible numeric character references.

Comment 1

[rubydoo123]

on windows, you use the alt key plus the keypad keys to insert special 
characters, which I tried, the special character insertion for double quote is 
alt+34 -- the entity was not entered, the " quote marks were entered.

I then selected to insert html, I entered ", and the " quote marks were 
inserted and not the entity.

I saved the file and viewed in 6.0 and in 4.x -- the page rendered correctly in 
both.

When you inserted the quotes using the option key sequences -- what was the html 
source at that time? Could you select HTML Source mode and note what the html is 
for the symbols you entered?

Comment 2

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

Attachment: Page typed in Editor (verbatim source)

Comment 3

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

Attachment: The page with decimal numeric character reference (modified in a text editor)

Comment 4

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

I tried the six characters displayed in the attached tables. The first attachment includes 
the references generated by Editor. The second attachment is an manually edited 
version with numeric (decimal) character references.

I think this issue probably affects all characters that are part of Windows CP1252 but 
aren't part of ISO-Latin-1. 

Comment 5

[rubydoo123]

ahh -- now I get what is happening, the entity name is being inserted and not 
the CDATA decimal character number. Assigning to jfrancis to see if he knows of 
a way to insert the decimal value instead of the entity name value

Comment 6

[Akkana Peck]

Adding Naoki, who might know something about where these entities are generated
and whether there's a flag to request the numeric versions, and Anthony, who may
need to keep informed of these issues in relation to the output system.

Comment 7

[nhottanscp]

I changed to create Latin1 entities only before we ship
(nsIEntityConverter::html40Latin1), we did not want to generate CER like
"“" or "”", so I am not sure why non Latin1 entities are generated.
Is this Macintosh only?

Comment 8

[Joe Francis]

as with 44374, I need someone else to own this.  This isn't related to my 
areas...

Comment 9

[rubydoo123]

this seems to be an issue with 4.x, viewing the mnemonic or decimal entities in 
4.x result in numerous errors, IE and 6.x render the values correctly. Marking 
as wontfix

Comment 10

[rubydoo123]

Attachment: testcase of all the entities in http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html#h-24.4

Comment 11

[sujay]

verified in 1/17 build.