Isolationism

It seems like it’s early days yet to be complaining, but I have a gripe: WordPress stinks at posting source code.

The problem is a bit long to explain but the issue is stifflingly simple: The visual TinyMCE text editor (and how it is implemented in WordPress, it seems) contrives to strip leading tabs and spaces from all lines of content—including content between <code> and <pre> tags.

Why is this a problem? Well, source code and markup are definitely easier to read with intendation, it’s true, but they aren’t essential. Or rather, they aren’t essential in most languages—but in Python, they have specific programmatic meaning (to denote blocks of code); if the indenting isn’t there, or the indenting isn’t right, the code simply won’t run.

I’ve spent at least 10 hours now sorting through JavaScript and PHP code trying to isolate the problem—and I’ve fixed most of the issues (it seems most of the problems stem from the folks at WordPress assuming you’re an idiot and put lots of extra spaces and things into your source code for shits and giggles), but code still gets scrambled when I edit an existing document (the tabs get stripped out and newlines get replaced with <br /> tags).

If you’re knowledgeable on the subject, please enlighten me.