The poor, misunderstood innerText

My impression from this is that "take the text nodes and format them with whitespace that corresponds to the browser layout" is a vague enough definition that browsers can't agree on precisely how to do that. So it seems like it shouldn't be standardised, but maybe a JS lib could step in to come up with a reliable way of doing it?

Oh boy, this is an article from April 2015. I had to look this ( innerText vs textContent) up yesterday and MDN had a much clearer explanation. "The innerText property of the HTMLElement interface represents the rendered text content of a node and its descendants." https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLElement...

I’ve been working on rich text editing ideas for the past month or so, and I have to say, innerText is probably not the solution you’re looking for, for that use-case. Despite what they say about standardization, there are still subtle differences between browsers over how exactly they handle certain elements and styles. The innerText property also does a feeble attempt at representing rich text whitespace, by making table cells tab-separated and adding an extra newline of padding around p…

Anybody who's interested in improving innerText's standing in the world should check out the WICG discussion on [standardizing innerText][1] and [CSS Plain-Text Conversion][2]. [1]: http://discourse.wicg.io/t/standardizing-innertext/799 [2]: http://discourse.wicg.io/t/css-plain-text-conversion/976