Bug 4616 – Setting nodeValue on a textnode with collapsed whitespace only has no visual effect

• Component: DOM
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Christopher Schmidt]

Whitespace in HTML is ill-defined: whether it defines a text node or not is up
to implementation authors. It seems that Safari/Webkit defines a nodeValue for
nodes like:

<div> </div> (whitespace inbetween) -- however, it is not possible to set the
nodeValue of this firstChild of the div element.

The URI above demonstrates this problem: Opera 8.10 and Firefox 1.0 both will
add "bar" text to the document, IE will simply return "whitespace is not
significant" -- but Safari will pop up the "bar" alert, but not actually add the
text.

[Mark Rowe (bdash)]

Confirmed with WebKit 412.7 and ToT WebKit.

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

Created attachment 7308 [details]
proposed fix

Is there a better way to create a missing renderer than detach()/attach()?

[Justin Garcia]

createRendererIfNeeded?

[Darin Adler]

Comment on attachment 7308 [details]
proposed fix

This does seem a little brute force. It's not immediately obvious to me if there's a better solution -- I'll have to research this later.

[Maciej Stachowiak]

This actually seems ok to me as a way to create a missing renderer. createRenderIfNeeded might work, but normally renderers are only created at attach time and there doesn't seem to be a huge reason to step away from that, since this is an unusual situation.