It is difficult to copy and paste HTML into inline-editable fields

[TylerRick]

If you copy and paste from another website, you get a bunch of extra HTML junk and style information, when all I wanted was the basic HTML paragraphs...

So I copy and paste to a text editor first to remove styles and then copy and paste that into the web page, but sometimes that pastes as a single paragraph (if you pasted inside a div, I think) and sometimes it pastes with a blank paragraph between each actual paragraph (if you pasted inside a p tag -- each newline character that you paste in creates a new paragraph). (This is the behavior in Chrome; Firefox is a bit different.)

This needs to be improved so it isn't so annoying...

The extra paragraphs are preferable over everything in a single paragraph.

Some possible areas of improvement:

• add a "paste plain text" option? or a "remove styles"/"reset styles to default" command? something so I don't have to paste to a plain text editor first just to get rid of unwanted styles...
• make it harder to create plain divs when you actually want paragraphs
• detect that user is pasting and prevent default behavior of creating blank paragraphs when 2 newlines are encountered?

I think we should make it easy to paste (and create from scratch) clean, plain HTML (styled by stylesheet alone) and less easy (though perhaps possible) to paste HTML with all styles and font tags (ick)., etc. left intact.

[jash]

This is also a problem for pasting from Word, or other word processors.

Note that the current CHSS website the client pasted in a table and liked it. As we don't have a table option in our editor yet, this was a feature, not a bug.

--John

[TylerRick]

I guess it could be considered a feature in some cases... :-)

Even if we add a "paste as plain HTML" option (or "paste from Word", or whatever), we should definitely try to preserve all important structural markup, which would definitely include tables. It's just the style information I'd want to strip out...