Question

I have the following HTML intending to make sure that the inner span isn’t editable. This works in other browsers but not IE8.

<div contenteditable="true">
  Luke, I am your father.
  <span contenteditable="false">I'm your son?! Ewww!</span>
  Don't speak back to me!
</div>

Here’s a JSFiddle to illustrate the point (use IE8 to test it): http://jsfiddle.net/haxhia/uUKPA/3/ .

How do I make sure that IE8 treats this properly as well?

Answer 1

Okay, I already have discovered the answer much like how Penicillin was discovered.

You see, playing around with this code, I mistakenly set contenteditable to true for the span and voila! It worked!

So, to make a span NON-contenteditable inside a contenteditable div, you just set its contenteditable attribute to true!

<div contenteditable="true">
  Luke, I am your father.
  <span contenteditable="true">I'm your son?! Ewww!</span>
  Don't speak back to me!
</div>

Here’s the file to demonstrate (use IE8 to open it): https://codepen.io/hgezim/pen/qMppLg .

Lastly, I didn’t post the question to get votes (although, they wouldn’t hurt!), but since the solution was so ridiculous and I didn’t find it here, I thought someone may find this tip time saving.