Mozilla Composer very often adds whitespace between words and at the
start of paragraphs.
There are some bad things going on in the code which rewrites
whitespace:
Spaces
Newlines
Non-breaking spaces
Tabs
into:
Spaces
Non-breaking-spaces
where a space may be converted to a newline according to some
system for limiting HTML line-length.
I believe that Bugsville is located at or in close association with:
/editor/base/nsHTMLEditRules.cpp
nsHTMLEditRules::DoTextNodeWhitespace
Please see my detailed bug report and example files regarding bad
things happening in Composer regarding whitespace:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61228
http://gair.firstpr.com.au/public-files/mozilla-bugs/
In one instance, I show how a line with apparently two spaces gets
expanded into many more, and where a line with 14 leading spaces
expands (the moment any change is made to the line) to 76 spaces, and
then gets even bigger if you change it again!
These problems are probably the continuation, via the old Netscape
code, of similar problems in N4.x Composer I reported in June 1999:
http://gair.firstpr.com.au/temp/composer-bugs/
There is some awkward work do be done, even without the algorithm for
limiting HTML line-length, because of the HTML rule of ignoring
consecutive spaces, and treating newlines as spaces. To implement
hard-spaces (as users want) with a combination of s and ordinary
spaces (for some reason, the code attempts to alternate between them,
but sometimes fails) is non-trivial.
I am not experienced in compiling Mozilla and I don't know my way
around the code at all. I am not proposing to fix it, but I hope that
these bug reports and example files will help someone else fix these
problems, which I think have bedevilled Composer for years.
I think Mozilla (and so N6) Composer is barely usable, and would drive
the average user nuts, because of these white-space anomalies. There
are other bugs as well, such as slabs of text disappearing and tables
being broken, but I haven't got sample files to demonstrate these yet.
Mozilla Composer has many wonderful features, especially in the colour
and table departments! This is why I am keen to report these bugs in
detail.
- Robin [EMAIL PROTECTED]
