Weird HTML tags not removing properly

[JohnKuan]

HTML.tags.not.removed.properly.mp4

Hi @stevengharris,

Not sure if this was mentioned previously or it is a regression.
There are "" and duplication of the tags being added to an empty inner html.

Is this the expected html behavior for adding styles to the text?

[stevengharris]

Hmm, no, that doesn't seem quite right. There are in fact empty styled elements added when the caret is outside of a word. This is to support the case of "I want to bold what I'm typing next". I am mostly using hot-keys for it, so I'm doing something like "type normal text -> CTRL+B -> type bolded text -> CTRL+B -> type normal text". To make this happen, I have to create a styled element like <b></b>, but it has to contain a non-printing character to be able to select inside it. You can see this in markup.js occasionally as const emptyTextNode = document.createTextNode('\u200B');. I then select that text, which you cannot see on the screen, and when you type it's replaced. It does have a kind of weird side effect that if you never type into it, as you navigate using arrow keys, the cursor stops at the empty element, but I think this is actually okay and probably the correct behavior. All of these empty elements are stripped when you getHTML, because I think of them as transient editing artifacts.

All that is a long explanation that is probably only tangentially related to what you showed in the video. I will check it out, thanks.