How to prevent | Mozilla FireFox (3.6) ContentEditable -- applies CSS to the editable container instead of it's content

I have some page with something like this:

<div id="editor" contenteditable="true">SomeText</div>

I have an selfmade JS editor which actually issues

document.execCommand(some_command,false,optional_value);

when user presses a button in the editor. (For example I have plain, simple [Bold] button).

Everything is fine as long as I apply editing to part of "SomeText". For example selecting "Text" with mouse and pressing [Bold] button (which leads to document.execCommand("bold",false,false);) will produce:

<div id="editor" contenteditable="true">Some<span style="some-css-here">Text</span></div>

but when I select entire content of the div ("SomeText" in this example) and press [Bold] in my editor, FF will not produce expected

<div id="editor" contenteditable="true"><span style="some-css-here">SomeText</span></div>

but rather

<div id="editor" contenteditable="true"  style="some-css-here">SomeText</div>

Notice the "style" attribute went into the editable div!

Why this makes a difference to me? --It's because after editing is done I would like to take the content of the editable div, along with all styles, formating etc and further use it on the page. But I can't -- all the styling now sits inside the div. A solution when I would be advised to extract styles from the div is not acceptable -- the div during its life takes a lot of styles from other active elements of the page (heavy jQuery usage)

So in brief: How to tell FF to never touch editable div and apply all styling to its inner contents only?

Sincere thanks for you time. (just pulled last of my hair, browsing FF dev site along with many others(((( )

Call once before any other execCommand and switch FF to tag mode

document.execCommand('StyleWithCSS', false, false);

Sometimes organizing and writing my thoughts brings me very positive results.

I have found satisfactory solution.

1)insert hidden div as a first child node into your editing div:

<div id="editor" contenteditable="true">
   <div class="edit_text_mozilla_hack"></div>
   SomeText
</div>

2) The CSS for it:

.edit_text_mozilla_hack {
    display: block;
    width: 0;
    height: 0;
    -moz-user-edit: none;
    -moz-user-select: none
}

3)Now you can edit. I tested it with this my small test (actually I need all this stuff to edit short pieces of text like like captions, news subjects etc)

4)Before you use the content -- obious -- remoe that div. 5)When you want to return to editing -- insert it again.

Some bits of code from working (finally! ))) project:

//adds hidden div to all editable regions 'editables'
//the parameter is for speeding the thins up -- I'm often working with all or a lot of editable regions
function editAddMozillaHack(editables) {
    if (!editables) {
        editables = editGetEditables();
    }
    $("." + adminOptions["admin_loader"]).remove();
    editables.each(function() {
        $(this).prepend('<div class="edit_text_mozilla_hack"></div>')
    });
}

//removes the hack from all regions
function editRemoveMozillaHack() {
    $(".edit_text_mozilla_hack").remove();
}

//just returns all the editable regions -- my project often requires them all
function editGetEditables() {
    return $("[contenteditable=\"true\"]");
}

of course -- testing pending. I would like to hear from you ;) regards.

I had the similar problem, when select all in contenteditable area with mouse or use CTRL-A there and then press CTRL+B for example, Firefox put style to the contenteditable container instead it's content.

<div contenteditable="true" style="font-weight: bold;"><p>..content..</p></div>

Same applyed for italic, font size, font-family and other inline styles. I wrote a function which fixing that issue. It creates new element below the content and changes selected range till that element:

function checkSelectAll (container, cmd, args) {
    if(document.getSelection) {
        var     cn = container.childNodes,
            s = document.getSelection(),
            r = s.getRangeAt(0);

        if(r.startContainer == container && r.endContainer == container){
            var endMarker = document.createElement('SPAN')
            container.appendChild(endMarker);
            r.setEndBefore(endMarker);
            s.removeAllRanges();
            s.addRange(r);
            document.execCommand(cmd,false,args);
            container.removeChild(endMarker);

        } else {
            document.execCommand(cmd,false,args);
        }
    } else {
        document.execCommand(cmd,false,args);
    }
};

this code affects only FF, for other browsers it will just apply execCommand