A test case that shows this behavior can be provided.

Two problems:

1. Even with <ice:outputText>, the use of the "<" and "&" characters will generate SAXParseException. You must use the entities "&lt;" and "&amp;". (This rather defeats the usefulness of the escape attribute?) The ">" character is OK.

SEVERE: Parse Fatal Error at line 711 column 41: The value of attribute "value" associated with an element type "null" must not contain the '<' character.
org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: The value of attribute "value" associated with an element type "null" must not contain the '<' character.

SEVERE: Parse Fatal Error at line 711 column 42: The entity name must immediately follow the '&' in the entity reference.
org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: The entity name must immediately follow the '&' in the entity reference.

2. Using the exact same method DOMUtils.escapeAnsi() to do the escape as in <ice:outputText>, with exactly the same escaped output string in the renderer, the characters will still show up as entities on the web page. See screenshot-01.png. Maybe the the browser just doesn't translate the entities in a label tag?

More puzzling findings:

1. Even with escape="false", <ice:outputText> still displays the characters properly. So what's the point of the escape?

2. Created a minimal HTML page to display entities in <label> tag, and it works properly. So what's different in our rendering that causes it not to work?

Label value was already always escaped inside createTextNode(). So why does the JIRA description say "ice:outputLabel no longer escapes the value"? When I added escapeAnsi() in the renderer, it caused a double escape.

Attribute added, and logic changed to avoid double escape.

Confusions:

When value is hardcoded, it goes through SAX parser, and the parser throws exceptions on certain characters. So user still has to escape themselves. In this case the parser will convert back to original characters before the renderer sees them.

When value is in messages file, characters don't go through parser.

Some characters will display properly whether you escape them or not.

Revision: 32946

Modified : /icefaces/trunk/icefaces/component-metadata/src/main/resources/conf/ice_properties/ice-outputLabel-props.xml
Modified : /icefaces/trunk/icefaces/core/src/com/icesoft/faces/renderkit/dom_html_basic/LabelRenderer.java

Confirmed using ICEfaces 1.8.2.GA_P06 build 1 in Firefox19, Chrome24, IE6/7/9.