emulating whitespace in span elements

today a came across a very anoying problem, I'm currently working on a WYSIWYG editor, my approach is to wrap every single character in an <span></span> tag which works fine for every char except a whitespace.

at first i added &nbsp; but my markup is fairly complex and the editor allows you to float image elements, so non breaking spaces are not an option since the text won't float correctly arround wrapper elements which are floated.

adding only a whitespace in the span tag doesn't make the cursor jump on key input, and adding more spans in a row collapse to only one space.

i solved this by emulating a white space by adding a whitespace followed by a BOM character.

<span>*\ufeff</span>

where * is the whitespace itself.

this seems to work accross all browsers.