Bug: all(?) browsers lose initial \n in textarea

Refactored from InconsistentTreatmentOfTextEncoding

If a topic on disc has a leading blank line, it is lost when the topic is edited in Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, IE(v6) and Konqueror browsers.

The problem would appear to be with the <textarea> element.

The text area in patternskin is defined as

<textarea>%TEXT%</textarea>

Look at this table. If the png and rendered rows differ on your browser, please inform us here!

	no newline	1 newline	2 newlines
text in topic	"fred©"	"\nfred©"	"\n\nfred©"
text in html document	<textarea>fred&copy;</textarea>	<textarea> fred&copy;</textarea>	<textarea> fred&copy;</textarea>
png
rendered	fred©	fred©	fred©
passed as	"fred©"	"fred©"	"\nfred©"
total loss	none	first leading \n	first leading \n

From http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/interact/forms.html:

In general, a control's "initial value" may be specified with the control element's value attribute. However, the initial value of a TEXTAREA element is given by its contents,

17.7 the TEXTAREA element

<!ELEMENT TEXTAREA - - (#PCDATA)       -- multi-line text field -->

None of the wiki engines reviewed solves the problem of the single leading \n lost each time you put text in a textarea element (with all tested browsers).

Solutions

prepend the string %TEXT% in the template with a newline. that is:

<textarea>
%TEXT%</textarea>

implemented by CrawfordCurrie in r3827.

-- ThomasWeigert, MarioFrasca, CrawfordCurrie

Discussion

Now, AFAICT from that spec above, all the browsers (including IE) are wrong. As I read it PCDATA should preserve the first newline, but by my testing, none of them respect it. I can live with that as long as it's consistent across all the browsers, and indeed I believe my checked in hack is correct for all the browsers.

The general problem of encoding data fields so they are content preserving is the domain of InconsistentTreatmentOfTextEncoding.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 20 Mar 2005

I refactored further, replaced the test to TestingTextareaAndHiddenInput... removed a few comments which were no more relevant.

-- MarioFrasca - 20 Mar 2005

tested with IE and Opera. behaviour confirmed. removed outdated discussion. hope it is all right with you.

-- MarioFrasca - 22 Mar 2005

Fix record

This is now cured, thanks to the extra newline at the start of the textarea. Note that this newline is in serted in code, not in the template.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 26 Mar 2005