Alexey Rusakov on Sitecore development

Friday, May 11, 2007

<setting name="HtmlEditor.LineBreak" value="br" />

HtmlEditor.LinkBreak is one of those settings you should know about. By default it's set to 'br', which means that every time editor presses Enter in Sitecore Content Editor, a ' ' tag is inserted.

I think it's wrong - isn't the enter button supposed to start a new paragraph? Changing the setting to "p" gets you there. Shift+enter, on the other hand, does the line break - here goes the tag.

Here is the difference between two; first, the default br setting:

Paragraph 1 [click enter]
 
Paragraph 2 [click enter]
 
..

Changing it to p:

Paragraph 1 [click enter]
Paragraph 2 [click enter]

It is semantic html, it feels right and is easier to style, even if you're not concerned with standard compliance. I wonder if there is still a compelling reason to keep having as a default?

Friday, May 11, 2007 9:48:27 AM (FLE Standard Time, UTC+02:00)

Comments [5]
Sitecore

Friday, May 11, 2007 1:15:16 PM (FLE Standard Time, UTC+02:00)

Hi Alexey

Guess I could mail you, but commenting is more fun :-)

There is actually a good reason why is default and it is appearance.

When a user hits the Enter key, they expect a single line feed.

The appearance of a is a single line feed, while appears as a double linefeed, unless a developer has provided a stylesheet class for .

So there you have it.

--Jakob

Jakob

Friday, May 11, 2007 1:36:30 PM (FLE Standard Time, UTC+02:00)

Jakob,

What if we style (in default.css) the p to have one line break in the editor, i.e. a decrease margin a bit?

And for the front end, I would expect most new sites to have styles for paragraphs these days. Perhaps I'm wrong here, but they can always switch back to br. It feels inconsistent that we set XHTML doctype by default, configure XSLTs to output xml but still use the rusty :-)

Alexey Rusakov

Thursday, June 28, 2007 1:52:08 AM (FLE Standard Time, UTC+02:00)

This is great commentary and information. I ran into this problem while training our content editors on how to use the editor. I agree with you on this issue, thus, will make the change to our new Sitecore installation to default to a paragraph instead of a break tag. Thanks!

Robert Huynh

Tuesday, July 10, 2007 2:24:45 PM (FLE Standard Time, UTC+02:00)

hey!

furthermore on this matter there's a post worth reading about how the RAD editor handles paragraphs, and specifically so how it strips paragraphs if there's just a single one - which could mess with any css having rules set for the paragraph..

you might run into that problem (i know we did), and the only way out of it was to write a custom processor that hooked onto the UISaveHtml pipeline and ensured the existance of a paragraph..

here's a link regarding this behavior on the RAD forum: http://www.telerik.com/community/forums/thread/b311D-ekeab.aspx

i'll shut up now :)

take care!

P.

Peter

Tuesday, July 10, 2007 6:19:41 PM (FLE Standard Time, UTC+02:00)

Peter,

yes, I had the same - but I never thought it was intentional on telerik's part :-/ .. I don't buy this "customers asked for" weird special case. If you want to introduce a hack, at least make a setting or something..

Alexey Rusakov

Comments are closed.