Hi - The behavior that you describe is coming from an optimization in Trinidad's HtmlResponseWriter, which detects and strips attribute-less span elements. I believe this optimization dates back to Oracle UIX. IIRC in certain scenarios we were ending up with multiple nested attribute-less spans due to renderers being overaggressive about wrapping their contents. The issue was addressed generically at the ResponseWriter level rather than by patching individual renderers, and since we tended to favor class-based selectors rather than DOM/contextual selectors, the absence of the spans was not a problem for styling.
If this optimization is causing problems for folks integrating non-Trinidad generated content with Trinidad, we should consider providing some way to disable this optimization - or possibly revisit whether the optimization is still useful. Andy
