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Why are there errant spans in my Confluence 4.3 pages?

Melissa Henders1

Confluence appears to enjoy adding unnecessary spans within my text. It isn't uncommon for a paragraph to appear like this:

This is an example of what I am seeing. I don't understand this.

I can use the Source Editor to remove code and most of the time, my changes stick. However, sometimes the spans come back even if the paragraph in question wasn't edited.

When the page is published, you can't tell there is anything wonky going on. The trouble lies in exporting the page to a Word document using Scroll Office. Many times these spans will cause text to be dropped from the export, so the Word version ends up printing the paragraph like this:

This at I am don't understand this

I've noticed that cutting and pasting can cause the spans to occur, as can applying the monospace character style or even italics. In other words, the causes seem to be all over the place. I've been editing them out, but now I am at a loss for why they are coming back.

I am using Confluence 4.3.7.

Accepted answers

Don Willis

Hi Melissa and Mick,

It's actually not Confluence that likes adding these spans. It's webkit browsers such as Chrome and Safari. Confluence tries to take them away again. The versions of those browsers available when Confluence 4.3 was released indicate that they have added the style spans by adding a special marker class "Apple-style-span" to those spans. Confluence's editor looks for that class and removes the spans again.

Unfortuntely Chrome 26 and up do not add that class to the style span, so Confluence 4.3 is unable to find and repair them.

There is nothing you can do about it other than use Firefox, or Chrome 25, or upgrade to Confluence 5.2 or above.

The public issue about this bug is https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-29193, but it currently explains less than I have here.

The operations most likely to cause these are:

deleting paragraphs/headings, particularly when it causes a heading and a paragraph to be combined
copying and pasting, particularly copying from another rich-text source such as an html page

I hope this helps to explain what's going on and hopefully you can get your Confluence instance upgraded to a version with the fix.

All comments

Mick Davidson_o2ws6w

Melissa,

I can't help you with this, but I've asked the same question myself and received NO answer. Which is pretty poor as I've found that it can cause problems with content formatting. In fact, that's how I know that this extra code has been added.

I get exactly what you've shown, even in the latest 5.n.n download.

Obviously I'm not the only one with this problem, so hopefully someone from Atlassian will bother to answer the question or at least shed some light on it.

Cheers.

Don Willis

Hi Melissa and Mick,

Unfortuntely Chrome 26 and up do not add that class to the style span, so Confluence 4.3 is unable to find and repair them.

There is nothing you can do about it other than use Firefox, or Chrome 25, or upgrade to Confluence 5.2 or above.

The public issue about this bug is https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-29193, but it currently explains less than I have here.

The operations most likely to cause these are:

deleting paragraphs/headings, particularly when it causes a heading and a paragraph to be combined
copying and pasting, particularly copying from another rich-text source such as an html page

I hope this helps to explain what's going on and hopefully you can get your Confluence instance upgraded to a version with the fix.

Mick Davidson_o2ws6w

Don,

thanks for the clarification. I can't remember see the apple-style tag, but I see lots of others. I can't give you a proper example at the moment, but formatting such as text size will appear in a tag. The same or more bizarre things will happen with bullets.

But I agree about why they happen, ie deleting page elements and copying etc. I've long suspected that those were the things that actually cause it to happen.

Cheers.

Don Willis

Hi Mick,

I don't think I've explained clearly. I should start by explaining that the Confluence editor is built on top of browsers' built-in editing control, and that these are notoriously finnicky. Much of Confluence's job is to stop these built-in editors doing things that are undesirable. These spans are an example of that.

The browser adds style tags in order to make content you've pasted look just like it did in the copy. (for example). However, Confluence wants all the content to look relatively consistent, so it strips these styles back out again.

However, in Chrome 26 a change was made to the style spans and Confluence could no longer find and remove them.

The gory detail is:

Earlier Chrome versions used to add a helpful marker to these spans, so instead of adding a span like Melissa describes:

whatever

It would include the class as a marker, like this:

whatever

And Confluence would dutifully see that class and strip the unwanted span out entirely.

In order to deal with that change in the browser, Confluence needs to be upgraded to version 5.2, where it uses other tactics for eradicating these spans.

Melissa Henders1

Thank you Don. I appreciate your detailed explaination.

So it seems that the two ways to resolve this issue are to either upgrade Confluence to 5.2 or, if a Confuence upgrade isn't an option, downgrade Chrome/use Firefox.