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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-04T14:51:28+00:00

Why do newlines appear as spaces or disappear on Enter/Return key in Opera for

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Why do newlines appear as spaces or disappear on Enter/Return key in Opera for contentEditable documents?

Try out this demo:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>contentEditable demo</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/>
</head>
<body contenteditable="true" spellcheck="true" dir="ltr">
<h1>Welcome to the contentEditable demo!</h1><p><span style="font-size: xx-large">
Try<span style="font-size: small">to type some text before the word "Try". You will see that random spaces are inserted before the word. Press Enter; you will see that the newline on the top disappears.</span></span></p></body>
</html>

Opera 11.50 Build 1074 on Windows Vista

Is this an Opera bug? I did not experience this bug with Windows Internet Explorer 8, Safari, Google Chrome, or Firefox 5.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I think that I may have discovered why from these links:

    [whatwg] Handling of collapsed whitespace in contenteditable:

    http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2011-June/032187.html

    • An nbsp at the end of a line makes the last word longer, so when you hit space, the last word on the line might jump to the next line. Then
      when you type a letter, the nbsp gets converted to a regular space and
      the word jumps back to the previous line.       (I observed this in Opera.
      IE and Gecko seem to have some special-case to avoid this; WebKit
      avoids it with a more general hack that I’ll note later.)
    • An nbsp that winds up immediately before a word will cause the word to be indented if it happens to start a line. Gecko seems to be very
      careful to avoid this case, but all other engines do it sometimes.
    • A long run of spaces of which some are spaces and some are nbsp’s can result in nbsp’s at the beginning of a line. Thus if you type
      three spaces in between two words for whatever reason, in some cases
      the second word can be indented. This is probably not what users
      want.

    Bug 13011 – [editing] Encourage authors to use “white-space: pre-wrap” for contenteditable=”” and .designMode=true:

    https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=13011

    Example of a potential problem without pre-wrap: if the user types
    “foo bar”, with two spaces in between, that will become either
    “foo  bar” or “foo  bar”. In the first case, “foo ”
    might wrap to the next line even though “foo” alone could fit on the
    current line. In the second case, if ” bar” starts a line, it
    will be visibly indented    .

    Best practices for in-page editors:

    http://developers.whatwg.org/editing.html#best-practices-for-in-page-editors

    In the former case, “yellow⍽” might wrap to the next line (“⍽” being
    used here to represent a non-breaking space) even though “yellow”
    alone might fit at the end of the line; in the latter case, “⍽ball”,
    if wrapped to the start of the line, would have visible indentation
    from the non-breaking space    .

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