Editing Absolute positioned DIVs in Firefox and IE is problematic

[David]

When using Mozilla Firefox (or at least version 9.0.1), when a DIV with absolute positioning is not the first thing you click inside the editor, then it becomes uneditable.

Paste this inside a CKEditor to re-create:

<div>1. Click me</div>
<div style="position:absolute;">2. now try to edit me</div>

I note that this works as expected in competing editors such as TinyMCE.

[Jakub Ś]

I note that this works as expected in competing editors such as TinyMCE.

That's not true. I have double checked the issue and working with the above code is the same problematic in TinyMCE as in CKEditor.

1. Issue seeems to be reproducible in Firefox3.x-9.x and IE6-9 form CKEditor 3.0
2. This is due to the fact both of these browsers provide resize handles for absolute positioned elements that are in contenteditable="true" elements.
3. When you click on a first div you won't be able to get to the second with Up/Down arrow. keys. In Firefox however it is possible to get to second div using left/right arrow keys. When you are at the end of line one just press left arrow to get to the next one.
4. In both browsers, you can get to second div by clicking on it and this is very problematic.

*In IE you have to double-click on that second div, *In Firefox you have to do some experimenting. I have to double/triple click on the text so it could get selected, the next click allowed for editing the text. Unfortunately cursor is not visible so the only option to find that out is to start typing.

We won’t be able to remove resize handles, but we could do something to improve access to that div. If possible with Up/down arrow and definitely with clicking and cursor visibility in Firefox.