This is an important issue that seems to get worse over time, not better. Source mode is typically going to be used by people with existing valid HTML fragments. The idea that CKeditor knows better and should protect people from their mistakes is one that should have been dismissed from the start. "Don't touch my HTML" should be the DEFAULT behaviour for source view. I've tried all the options like autoParagraph, allowedContent, fillEmptyBlocks, etc but there seems to be no straightforward answer to make CKEditor and plugins leave source changes alone.

A simple search of this forum and Google show an almost daily repetition of "ckeditor is changing my X ..." threads and tickets. I can accept that some responsibility lies with the browser (especially IE) but there is no reason for CKEditor to make things worse.

If the developers feel it's too late to change the default behaviour then at least give us a single unambigious preserveSource option that prevents all other source auto "correction" regardless of whether it is core or plugin related and regardless of whether the fragment is "valid" or "dangerous". These are all value judgments that presume knowledge of the fragments' purpose and intended usage.

In summary, please provide a SINGLE, unoveriddable option to: not change my entities, not fix my unclosed tags, not add "missing" tags, not change whitespace and indents, not remove empty elements, not correct Word snippets, not remove scripts, not replace tags, not remove unknown tags, not remove doctypes, not remove comments, not change html to xhtml, not do anything to the source - ever!

It seems that you're too confused:

I'm not a CKSource employee, I don't speak for CKSource and probably CKSource might disagree with whatever I say.
All the CKSource employees are using a signature stating that, so I don't understand why you think that I speak for CKSource.

My way to change things is to propose fixes for the bugs that affect me, not to rant about them.

First of all, thanks Alfonso for clarifying few things in this topic, because most of what SpliFF and jnoreiga wrote is just complete nonsense. You're right that most of us avoid answering in such threads, although from time to time a situation is becoming so ridiculous that it is time to speak.

By buying a commercial license AFAIK you're buying a support, not a custom development. Therefore you cannot request from us to fix issues you report, because you haven't paid for that. I'm not saying that we ignore bug reports - I would love to fix most of the real bugs (not an incorrectly understood behaviors), but we're not able to do this. Developing WYSIWYG editor is a real pain in the ass (read my summary of the current situation in browsers) and thanks to that: a) fixing issues takes a lot of time, b) we are generating more issues than we normally would because problems we need to solve are so complicated.

CKEditor is not a code editor, but a WYSIWYG editor. You might be confused by the presence of source mode, but there's a huge difference between them. In fact, personally I think that we should head in the direction where the source mode would be redundant. Most often it is needed when a user (a developer in this case, cause he knows HTML) wants to insert/change something what is not possible with the UI. But this is only a replacement of the real solution which is needed. Developer can write HTML - he does not need a WYSIWYG editor. Normal users, on the other hand, need WYSIWYG editor, so they should be able to edit entire documents in WYSIWYG mode. To achieve this editor needs to be correctly configured (styles, templates, formats, etc.) and it needs new features like widgets on which I'm currently working on.

So again - if what matters for you is "LEAVE MY HTML AS IT IS", then use a code editor, not a WYSIWYG editor. Code editor cares about your code, WYSIWYG editor cares about yours document contents (created in WYSIWYG mode). And carrying about contents requires from us not carrying about (very often invalid from semantical or spec's POV) HTML so much.

BTW. I wonder if community's better knowledge about contenteditable and how WYSIWYG editors work would help in such cases. I believe so, so I'm working on article about that.

In summary, please provide a SINGLE, unoveriddable option to: not change my entities, not fix my unclosed tags, not add "missing" tags, not change whitespace and indents, not remove empty elements, not correct Word snippets, not remove scripts, not replace tags, not remove unknown tags, not remove doctypes, not remove comments, not change html to xhtml, not do anything to the source - ever!

I hope we'd avoid such ridiculous requests :|.

FFS. What a hostile community and even the devs!

There is nothing RIDICULOUS about asking CKEditor to leave the source alone. It does not NEED to be injected back into contenteditable as that is an implementation issue (it could just as easily be written UNMODIFIED into a textarea/memory backing store and retreived with getData regardless of the contentEditable state). A simple "Save Source" button would suffice.

Your assumption that source mode is not used or unnessessary is completely wrong. I have put ckeditor into about 30 client websites and at least 5 of those clients use the source mode regularly (1 in every 6 clients). Most of those use the source mode because of limitations in the WYSIWYG mode.

Your statement that this is a browser issue is also wrong. While I can't speak for jnoreiga I can say that I specifically mentioned that I can accept browser limitations if I have to but this is about those changes made by ckeditor. I KNOW ckeditor makes changes because the behaviour of several of the issues raised has changed between ckeditor versions but not browser versions - ergo; ckeditor modifies the source and does not document clearly the ways in which it does so or the means of disabling it entirely. It took me several hours to piece together a set of configuration options and they still don't disable all of ckeditors changes.

This could have been a civilised discussion but all you've done is muddy the issue and insult your clients. Call your clients ridiculous and tell them what they need at your own peril.

You've made this topic a mess before I even read it. You found Alfonso being too defensive, as you thought a developer would be, but you couldn't be more wrong. He is neither a core developer nor a blind fan. His feedback, often quite negative, is always very helpful. And you accused him of being too defensive...

I've read the beginning of this thread one more time now and I see that all questions were answered. You fixed your original issue (which I'm not able to reproduce) and j.swiderski reported a ticket for the &shy  case which might be caused by editor or by the IEs - hard to tell now.

Then you listed 3 issues:

1. I'm not able to reproduce it. I've got: <p><answer></answer></p> which is a correct output when you haven't modified CKEDITOR.dtd.
2. #9998 is an another awful Webkit's issue which we can only fix by overwriting entire backspace/del behaviour (just a week or two of work and dozens of issues to be fixed, because it is impossible to create perfect implementation for the first time), but yes... excuses.
3. And finally a valid ticket for an issue caused by a very problematic bogus BRs in FF.

But the only question was:

I need a way for the html, regardless of whatever it is, is not automatically modified on load.

And as was answered - it is impossible. Editor needs to prepare the content to be loaded to the contenteditable, then browser does its changes and then editor have no information what was the intention of source's author before all this.

EOT for me.

I am looking for a solution to the serious problem I experience in an email marketing product I bought which has CKEditor as part of it. I have clients who create their own HTML Emails - when it is pasted in the product I bought CKEditor WYSIWYG editor, the HTML that appeared fine in a browser (IE, Chrome, Safari, etc) beofre is changed by CKEditor - resulting in an unacceptable end result.

From the arrogance and antagonism I read in this thread towards the simple question asked initially, it seems that I should have been more careful when I bought a product that uses CKEditor - because I DO NOT WANT IT TO CHANGE THE HTML I PASTE INTO THE EDITOR. So, maybe you should tell the world more boldly that you change the HTML you allow them to enter in order to make your maintenance of the product easier BEFORE they use it as part of their products they sell on to unsuspecting idiots like me.

Pity

CKEditor is a WYSIWYG editor for documents, not an HTML editor or a WYSIWYG website builder. Because of the job it is supposed to do and  technologies we can use, it has to "touch" loaded HTML. We are not responsible for other developers choosing wrong tool for the job or not configuring CKEditor properly. 

Thank you. I agree in principle, but then those product vendors should also be advised by you because they are clearly not. You also now refer to configuring CKEditor "properly" which can clearly NOT be configured to do this. So, your product does WYSIWYG and should not allow the user to see or change the HTML. Remove that button/functionality and then all confusuoin will go away !

Enough said on this topic and no further "clever" response required thanks,

Hi All,

how can i keep the space between textarea tag when we toggele the source to UI mode like the following <textarea> </textarea>

what  i mean to say here is where can i add this space in Ckeditor.js(I think) ,this is only for textarea not for others so can any one help me.

Thanks in advance