General Idea:
Let's establish consistency around the way that new, empty paragraphs render in Gutenberg and on the front end.
- We could do this by adopting the Classic Editor's method of rendering empty paragraphs as
<p> </p> on the front end.
- To complete the effect, we'd likely want to adjust our empty paragraph placeholders so that they only appear on hover and select.
Details:
Currently, Gutenberg and WP-Admin treat empty paragraphs differently:
To me, the classic editor approach is closer to what I’d expect: what I typed in the editor is more or less rendered in the front end.
Here's the technical reason for that difference: Gutenberg renders all those empty blocks as <p></p> and they get collapsed in the front end because they’re empty. By contrast, the classic editor renders all those empty paragraph lines as <p> </p>. Adding in there may seem a little weird — but for a user who doesn’t care about code, it just ensures that an empty paragraph behaves as expected. This functionality is similar to what you see in any other word processor: you hit return a few times, and you get an extra empty line. I tend to like this approach, and I suggest we consider adopting it.
(Yes, we have a — very useful! — spacer block to add extra space, but that doesn't make a lot of sense if you're in a writing mindset: If you're typing, and you want to add extra empty line, the return is key by far the easiest way to add that.)
If we did adopt this, we'd likely want to make a little update to our placeholders too. If empty paragraphs rendered as blank new lines in the front end, they should appear as blank new lines in the backend too.
To accomplish that, one solution would be to switch to showing the placeholder text only on hover and select:
(The "show placeholder until you start typing" behavior is similar to the way slack handles their placeholders.)
This would help us eliminate the very repetitive placeholder effect you currently see when you hit return many times in a row (#2466):
We've been having great progress in #9314 around changing that placeholder copy slightly (and also, replacing the default "Write your story" copy at the top of posts with the new version). If the ideas in here make sense for us, I could see this change landing nicely alongside that update.
Looking forward to hearing others' thoughts.
General Idea:
Let's establish consistency around the way that new, empty paragraphs render in Gutenberg and on the front end.
<p> </p>on the front end.Details:
Currently, Gutenberg and WP-Admin treat empty paragraphs differently:
To me, the classic editor approach is closer to what I’d expect: what I typed in the editor is more or less rendered in the front end.
Here's the technical reason for that difference: Gutenberg renders all those empty blocks as
<p></p>and they get collapsed in the front end because they’re empty. By contrast, the classic editor renders all those empty paragraph lines as<p> </p>. Adding in there may seem a little weird — but for a user who doesn’t care about code, it just ensures that an empty paragraph behaves as expected. This functionality is similar to what you see in any other word processor: you hit return a few times, and you get an extra empty line. I tend to like this approach, and I suggest we consider adopting it.(Yes, we have a — very useful! — spacer block to add extra space, but that doesn't make a lot of sense if you're in a writing mindset: If you're typing, and you want to add extra empty line, the return is key by far the easiest way to add that.)
If we did adopt this, we'd likely want to make a little update to our placeholders too. If empty paragraphs rendered as blank new lines in the front end, they should appear as blank new lines in the backend too.
To accomplish that, one solution would be to switch to showing the placeholder text only on hover and select:
(The "show placeholder until you start typing" behavior is similar to the way slack handles their placeholders.)
This would help us eliminate the very repetitive placeholder effect you currently see when you hit return many times in a row (#2466):
We've been having great progress in #9314 around changing that placeholder copy slightly (and also, replacing the default "Write your story" copy at the top of posts with the new version). If the ideas in here make sense for us, I could see this change landing nicely alongside that update.
Looking forward to hearing others' thoughts.