Is there any way I can prevent CKEditor removing empty elements like <i></i>, <b></b> and <a href="/some/url"></a>? I don't want to add a space character.
I can't find anything in the config other than ”config.allowedContent = true", which doesn't help with this problem.
CKEditor is a WYSIWYG editor
I'll paraphrase one of the devs (Reinmar):
CKEditor is a WYSIWYG editor so it’s designed to show what you see, not what’s in the background. Of course it is possible to style inline elements so they are visible even when empty, but this simply means that someone is doing something wrong. If you want to be able to preserve empty (so meaningless) inline elements, then you're most likely trying to use CKEditor as website builder which it is not. It is a document editor and documents should not contain such content.
And there's no way to add a configuration option for this because it could dramatically increase the editor's complexity. Every new configuration option that affects the entire editing experience means doubling (if it is a true/false setting) the number of possible cases, therefore the less of them the better for us and for users.
Customer and Community Manager, CKSource
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