Chrome adds <br> to contenteditable span with a :after if its content is deleted; bug?

contenteditable, css, google-chrome

Solution

Wanna see something CRAZY?!

http://jsfiddle.net/joeframbach/VXMEN/

<body>
<div id="EDIT-AREA">
    <span class='CHARACTER-NAME' contenteditable='true'>Bob</span><span>&nbsp;</span>
</div>
</body>

Adding a span with a space after it fixes the problem. Don't ask me why or how.

Problem

Is the following functionality a bug in Chrome, or is it correct behavior that I don't understand? In Chrome (version 25), if I have a content editable span which has a node added after it through a :after css class, as in this jsfiddle http://jsfiddle.net/yQBvn/ if I delete all of the content of the span, after I've deleted the last character, Chrome adds a `<br>` to the content editable span. This doesn't feel right. I've verified that Chrome does not do this if the :after css content isn't added, and I've verified that Firefox doesn't do this in any case.

Original source