763877 - 'SS' is displayed instead of 'ß' when using the css-attribute "text-transform: uppercase"

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: Layout: Text and Fonts, defect)

Description

[Oliver Leumann]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:13.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/13.0
Build ID: 20120601045813

Steps to reproduce:

I've used the german special character 'ß' (e.g. the Word 'Großhandel') in some content of a german website which uses the css-attribute "text-transform: uppercase".


Actual results:

Instead of having the content displayed as 'GROßHANDEL', firefox renders it to ''GROSSHANDEL"


Expected results:

I think it should be rendered as 'GROßHANDEL' ... (IE does it that way) ... but I'm really not sure how the new official german grammair rules define it.

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

There is no uppercase ß but in case you want to write uppercase you use the lowercase ß and in your example "GROßHANDEL" is correct.

Comment 2

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

According to bug 744357 we have a special rule to replace ß with SS.

According to http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9F#Gro.C3.9Fschreibweise_mit_Ersetzung_von_.C3.9F_durch_SS either the replacing with SS or a lowercase ß (mixed uppercase/lower case) are used.Replacing is the official rule. I have learned something new.....

Comment 3

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

There is an uppercase es-zet character ẞ encoded as U+1E9E "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S", but this is _not_ the standard uppercase mapping of ß (U+00DF). As mentioned in the Unicode data file SpecialCasing.txt:

<quote>
# The German es-zed is special--the normal mapping is to SS.
# Note: the titlecase should never occur in practice. It is equal to titlecase(uppercase(<es-zed>))

00DF; 00DF; 0053 0073; 0053 0053; # LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S
</quote>

So the standard uppercase transformation of "ß" is indeed "SS", as implemented by Firefox. The capital ẞ character (which was only added to Unicode in version 5.1) is provided for specialist purposes - it's sometimes used in all-uppercase signage, for example - but is not the default uppercase equivalent of "ß".

To render either "GROßHANDEL" (with lowercase ß in the middle) or "GROẞHANDEL" (with capital ẞ), you'd need to enter the text in the correct case form as you want it displayed, and not rely on the text-transform property, which will use the standard mapping ß -> SS.