HTMLLineTable inserts newline tokens for some reason, causing extra newlines when copying

[jneen]

As @UlyssesZh mentions here: #2274 (comment)

I think this is a bug and should be fixed. When in the context of a table, there is no danger of not linewrapping, as each element is contained in a separate <tr> tag, so there should not be any newlines in the generated HTML.

[jneen]

Okay after some experimentation, it seems that the double newlines are in the copied text even if I modify it so zero newlines are in the HTML source, so I will have to dig a bit further into when browsers decide to insert newlines into copied text and if that is avoidable in this case.

[UlyssesZh]

This will have two newlines copied:

<pre>1</pre><pre>2</pre>

[jneen]

I see - so any <pre> tag will be surrounded by double newlines regardless of the contents.

[jneen]

@UlyssesZh Would there be any issue with structuring it this way (simplified):

<pre><code>
  <table>
    <tr><td>1</td><td><span ...><!-- ... --></span></td>
    <!-- ... -->
  </table>
</code></pre>

This seems to copy/paste correctly at least in Firefox. This would be a breaking change, but I would consider it a bugfix and we are about to bump a major version anyways.

[jneen]

With this solution though the <td> elements inexplicably end up being different widths, though, hm

[UlyssesZh]

<pre> is needed to preserve whitespaces. Can <span> do it?

[jneen]

The whole table is contained in a <pre> in my example.

[UlyssesZh]

Oh I missed that. Then yeah it should be fine. We should use <code> instead of <span> though.

[jneen]

Those <span>s are individual tokens, which should probably stay as spans? The whole thing is also wrapped in <code> but I'm going to be honest with you the need for both <pre> and <code> for some reason annoys me to no end 😅.

[UlyssesZh]

Oh I got it. So each cell will be <td><code><span>...</span></code></td>.

Yeah it is kind of annoying. There are a lot of annoying things in web standards.