Why Is My Contenteditable caret Jumping to the End in Chrome?

Question

Scenario

I have a contenteditable

area, and within this area I may have some

Answer 1

The problem is that your contenteditable element is a div, which by default is display: block. This is what causes your caret position problem. This can be fixed by making the outermost div non-editable and adding a new editable div that will be treated as inline-block.

The new HTML would have a new div just inside the outer one (and the corresponding closing tag at the end):

...

And add this to your CSS:

div#editable {
    display: inline-block;
}

For the sake of seeing the caret better when it is between span elements, I've also added margin: 2px to the rule for div.main span in the CSS but this is not necessary to prevent the caret jumping issue reported in the question.

Here is a fiddle.

As you've started discovering, contenteditable is handled inconsistently across browsers. A few years back, I started working on a project (in-browser XML editor) where I thought contenteditable would make everything easier. Then as I developed the application, I soon found myself taking over the functions that I thought contenteditable would give me for free. Today, the only thing contenteditable give me is that it turns on keyboard events on elements I want to edit. Everything else, including caret movement and caret display, is managed by custom code.