I tested adding first
<font face="impact">test1<span style="font-family: tahoma,arial,helvetica,sans-serif">test some text</span> test2</font>

and then

<span style="font-family: impact">test1<span style="font-family: tahoma,arial,helvetica,sans-serif">test some text</span> test2</span>

to htmlarea (the latest weekly 1.9.2+ with IE7 and FF3 ) and could not reproduce this. Both seem to work ok...font is changed inside span tags.

Maybe some filter is causing your problem?

Thanks.

Bill

i have nothing to do with Database activity (wrote previous comment only for editor) but after a quick check it looks like file mod/data/field/textarea/field.class.php and function update_content

else { $content->content = clean_param($value, PARAM_CLEAN); }

cleans span tags. Another thing is that even if you delete those tags (then it will stay as you wrote it , uncleaned in database and in editor when you edit content) moodle filters the visible content when you view database in view.php - this may be some security issue (I really don't know the reason)

I hope Eloy, Peter, Martin or some other core developer can give you better explanation.

1) The most obvious is that the clean is cleaning too much (it's cleaning the font-family selector and it shouldn't). it's easy to fix. Will be in CVS in some minutes (I'll post here once committed).

2) The second problem is WHEN that cleaning is happening. I really thing that we don't have to clean before insert or update DB, mainly because we always clean on display (format_text(), format_string()). So I'd suggest database module to don't perform that clean when inserting/updating those "textarea" fields.

In fact, doing that causes wrongly-cleaned contents to be sent to DB, so they cannot be recovered. In the other side, cleaning on display... guaranties that contents in DB are the ones entered by user, i.e. the cleaning doesn't destroy anything.

Adding to Robert and Martin here... ciao

2) waiting for answer about to avoid that cleaning before insert/update in database module.

Ciao

Reading it I don't think that "allowing to bypass the setting to admins" is completely correct. Because then, other users can arrive. Perhpas a new capability (edit:useembedandobject or so) could be added to the system to allow selectively permissions about who can use those tags? (just thinking as I type, not really sure if that's possible). I'd suggest you to comment there, to leave both bugs separated.

Ciao

-eric