Why does Confluence use class="auto-cursor-target"

[Bill Bailey]

This is more of a curiosity.

I often have to edit the storage code for a page to clean up various items. I noticed awhile back that the following code would appear, I guess as a spacer around some objects?

 <p class="auto-cursor-target">
     <br/>
</p>

It seems the be filtered out when the page is displayed. Does anyone know why Confluence is inserting this code?

[Davin Studer]

I believe it has something to do with collaborative editing as I have only seen that when Synchrony is turned on.

[Bill Bailey]

That could be. I know I can delete them, but they are reinserted. The only reason I care is it creates extra phantom space in the editor view that causes me to think it is empty p tags or something like this:

<p>
     <br/>
</p

[Christian Czaia [Decadis AG]]

You can manually edit the HTML, get rid of the auto-cursor-target and add a <span></span> instead. 

Directly save the page and don't touch or edit it again ant the <br> is gone. We use this for example for pages that we include in other pages.

This will not help everyone but at least it works :-)

[PiginSpace]

This was helpful because after replacing <p class="auto-cursor-target"> <br/></p> with <span></span>, I saw what auto-cursor-target was doing. It managed the space between macro elements, in my case the structured macro element for an ac=info element.

Actually, without auto-cursor-target I got a full paragraph height of white space after a note, so when I had consecutive notes it didn't look good. With auto-cursor-target the white space following the note was reduced, which looked much better. This works for all sorts of elements it seems, like checklists. 

I'd wondered why I sometimes had a lot and sometimes a little white space after these macro elements. Now I know that when I want the standard paragraph white space following, I'll check that I have <span></span> in the code, and when I want reduced white space following, I'll make sure that I have the auto-cursor-target paragraph. Great find! Thank you.

[Brian Packham]

auto-cursor-target is like a virus. Once it gets into your page is messes up the formatting and it is very hard to get rid of