title: Prevent TinyMCE from removing span elements
body: <p><strong>Here is the problem demonstration</strong></p>
  
  <p>You can try it here: <a href="http://fiddle.tinymce.com/SLcaab" rel="noreferrer">http://fiddle.tinymce.com/SLcaab</a></p>
  
  <p>This is TinyMCE default configuration</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>less all the plugins</li>
  <li>with extended_valid_elements: "span"</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>1 - Open the Html Source Editor</p>
  
  <p>2 - Paste this html into the Html Source Editor:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;p&gt;&lt;span&gt;Hello&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.google.com"&gt;Google 1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.google.com"&gt;Google 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>3 - Click update in the Html Source Editor to paste the html in the editor</p>
  
  <p>4 - Remember there is a span around 'Hello'.</p>
  
  <p>5 - Place your cursor just before Google 2 and press backspace (the two links should merge inside the same paragraph element).</p>
  
  <p>6 - Look at the resulting html using the Html Source Editor.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Result (problem)</strong>: No more span in the html document even though we added 'span' to the extended_valid_elements in the TinyMCE settings.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Note:</strong> I removed all the plugins to make sure the problem is at the core of TinyMCE.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Edit 1 - I also tried:</strong> valid_children : "+p[span]" - still does not work</p>
  
  <p><strong>Edit 2:</strong> Only reproduced on WebKit (OK on Firefox and IE)</p>