[whatwg] Pressing Enter in contenteditable: <p> or <br> or <div>?

[Boris Zbarsky]

On 5/13/11 1:26 PM, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
> So it's an attribute that affects serialization in a nonstandard way?

Far as I can tell, yes.

> What sort of serialization does it affect?

Gecko has way too many serialization modes, most of them not web-exposed 
(to support writing decent HTML editors and the like).  See the various 
flags in 
http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/content/base/public/nsIDocumentEncoder.idl

The _moz_dirty flag affects most of those modes, but see below.

> I just tested innerHTML,
> and I found it stripped the attribute, but it didn't seem to add any
> whitespace around<br>,<ol>, or<li>.

innerHTML uses OutputRaw which ensures that no prettyprinting happens 
ever, no matter what, even if a gun is held to the serializer's head. 
In particular, it overrides the _moz_dirty flag.

Similar for copy/paste.

I would suspect that there is no web-observable serialization behavior 
that depends on _moz_dirty.

> If you're going to add pretty-printing, doesn't it make more sense to
> just add the text nodes directly to the DOM?

Dunno; I didn't write the editor and don't have much experience with its 
internals.

> You're going to have to deal with the extra nodes anyway as soon as the content round-trips to
> a server.

This code exists for an HTML editor.  There's no round-tripping 
involved.  You're just editing some HTML.

-Boris