Re: collapsible property

On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 10:52 PM, Patrick Garies <pgaries@fastmail.us>
 wrote:

>  The fact that the native contentEditable behaviour of webkit, gecko
>
> and IE all differ in how they solve this (webkit installs a BR when
>> the block element is empty, gecko always has a BR, and IE puts a
>> magic&nbsp;) indicates that this is a problem that needs a standard
>> solution. They are also buggy, in that they don't always correctly
>> employ their respective trick, resulting in collapsed unusable block
>> elements (and it is even harder for a javascript application trying
>> to control this to figure out when it should employ the trick).
>>
>
> I'm not very familiar with |contentEditable|. Maybe that feature should
> be amended at the HTML level if this is behavior that should be built in?
>

It's certainly possible to argue that empty block elements inside a
contentEditable region should not collapse. The problem with that is that
when you take the contents out and put them elsewhere (e.g. when you publish
your rich-text blog-post), they'll no longer be in a contentEditable region
and collapse. Also, I would fear that changing the meaning of
contentEditable in this way would break existing sites.

With a CSS property, you can ensure that the rendering will be the same
whether or not contentEditable is on.

On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 10:18 AM, Brad Kemper <brad.kemper@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It seems to me that what you want is a way for empty elements (no text or
> child elements in them) to have a used height that is what it would be if
> there was a character in it. So perhaps something like the following would
> work (in UAs that support it):
>
> p:empty::after { content: '\200C' }
>
> If I did that correctly, it would insert a zero-width space into the P
> element.
>

Something like this is conceptually correct, except that p:empty doesn't
apply to P elements that just have a span in them, or just have whitespace,
etc.

I can't speak for other rendering engines, but WebKit already has an
internal concept of whether a block is collapsible.
http://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/WebCore/rendering/RenderBlock.cpp#L4400

Ojan