BUG: character replacement breaks site

WordPress replaces the pattern “(\d+)x(\d+)” with “\1×\2”. This breaks WordPress installations on hosts that have such a pattern in their name because all the URLs (for example, to the CSS file) get changed from, say, “host-2×2” to “host-2×2”. This bug caused my WordPress installation not to work out of the box, and it was only because I noticed this in the HTML source that I managed to fix it (by deleting the code that did the replacement).

At the very least, these “beautifications” should only happen inside actual text, not globally across the whole page. But, generally, I think those replacements are a bad idea anyway, since even if just applied to text, they break things: passwords, identifiers, etc.