Another inconsistent treatment of newlines in browsers

SectionalEditPlugin ran into another problem with browsers treating newlines differently. You may recall from SomeBrowsersLoseInitialNewlineInTextArea that we had to work around a problem with browsers eating leading newlines in text areas. Now I discovered that Firefox eats leading newlines in hidden input, while IE does not. Look at the experiment below (thanks to CrawfordCurrie for this example):

abc

def






Result is

Textarea input
Hidden input

Result in Firefox 1.5:

http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/edit/Codev/SomeBrowsersLoseMoreNewlines?mytestarea=%0D%0Aabc%0D%0A%0D%0Adef%0D%0A%0D%0A&mytesthidden=abc%0D%0A%0D%0Adef

Result in Firefox 1.0.7 on Win XP:

http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/SomeBrowsersLoseMoreNewlines?mytestarea=%0D%0Aabc%0D%0A%0D%0Adef%0D%0A%0D%0A&mytesthidden=abc%0D%0A%0D%0Adef

Result in IE 6.0:

http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/SomeBrowsersLoseMoreNewlines?mytestarea=%0D%0Aabc%0D%0A%0D%0Adef%0D%0A%0D%0A&mytesthidden=%0D%0A%0D%0Aabc%0D%0A%0D%0Adef%0D%0A%0D%0A

FWIW, in the textarea, Konqueror 3.4.2 eats the leading but not the trailing newline.

-- Contributors: ThomasWeigert

Discussion

I am sure this difference does have impact somewhere in TWiki, and will come to bite somebody. This was discovered debugging a problem of SectionalEditPlugin on Firefox.

-- ThomasWeigert - 04 Aug 2006