Last modified: 2011-11-20 18:48:13 UTC
Currently Firefox browsers replace non-breaking spaces with normal spaces when editing page. There should be a workaround on MediaWiki side: all Unicode U+00A0 spaces in article code should be replaced with another symbol (something like U+20DE) before sending edit form to browser. When saving code, U+20DE should become U+00A0. Such a behavior should be enabled: 1. for Firefox users by default 2. for other users who enabled this option in their user settings Also, that's good to replate with U+20DE too.
U+20DE is Combining Enclosing Square according to my character map. Surely you don't want a combining character to stand in for an nbsp? In fact, you probably don't want any valid Unicode general-use character for that; you'd want a private-use character from the U+F0.. range, because otherwise this will eat valid uses of the substituted character. Arguably nobody should be using raw nbsp's in an input box anyway, since it's horribly confusing: converting them to entities for everyone would also work. Is this unacceptable to anyone?
It's not so important which character to select for substitution, but we need to save Unicode spaces anyway. The actual reason is that there're many typographical rules in Russian Wikipedia which require non-breaking spaces; currently we use but it's too hard to read article with many -s present.
Fair enough. Of course, Firefox users will have to see all those boxes, which is as bad for them. It would be interesting to consider ways to automatically add nbsp's during rendering in certain positions, on a per-language basis; certainly there are many rules of that sort for English as well, and undoubtedly other languages, which should be fairly easily to algorithmize. This is data loss, so I'm setting severity to major.
Created attachment 3229 [details] proposed solution safeUnicodeOutput() clone that only replaces the nbsp character.
Still a problem with FF3.6
*Bulk BZ Change: +Patch to open bugs with patches attached that are missing the keyword*
Thank you for the patch, shattered, and I'm sorry it's been so long and no one has responded to review your patch. I've added the need-review keyword so developers know that it awaits review.
(In reply to comment #5) > Still a problem with FF3.6 How about FF8?
(In reply to comment #8) > (In reply to comment #5) > > Still a problem with FF3.6 > > How about FF8? Yay, it's fixed. See http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Sandbox&oldid=461634004 (nbsp between 17 and km) Upstream bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=218277
