314694 - Pasting of copied text to a plain text edit box should not have whitespaces preserved if the text is not preformatted

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: DOM: Serializers, defect, P5)

Description

[Ng Ming Hong]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051025 Firefox/1.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051025 Firefox/1.5

Currently, whitespaces are preserved when pasting copied text into a plain text edit box, e.g. textarea, text editor, etc. This can be confusing, as what I copied is not what I pasted. Conside the following:

<p>
  Oh, Hello
  World!
</p>

Say I've copied "Hello World". But what I pasted will be "Hello\n  World", not "Hello World". If I paste such text to a single-line input control, the second line will be dropped, leaving just "Hello".

When pasting into a plain text control, whitespaces should only be preserved for preformatted elements, e.g. <pre>, <div style="white-space: pre">, etc. Whitespaces can also be preserved when pasting into rich text editor, since this doesn't have any diffferent visually.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Copy some text which contains some whitespace (spaces, newlines, etc)
2. Paste the text into a plain text box

Actual Results:  
Whitespace preserved. Data loss if the input control allows only one line of text.

Expected Results:  
Ignore extra whitespaces. Treat multiple whitespaces as a single space character.

Comment 1

[Jens Stutte [:jstutte]]

Bulk-downgrade of unassigned, >=5 years untouched DOM/Storage bugs' priority and severity.

If you have reason to believe this is wrong, please write a comment and ni :jstutte.