Manually editing source strips href tags

Steps to reproduce

View node and/or edit node, the html source renders as

<p>
    <a>Hello</a>
</p>

This is correct behavior. That's not the bug you reported in Drupal Slack!

CKEditor 4 and 5 have both always required <br> and <p> to work correctly. CKEditor 4 tried its best to get by, but didn't actually support it; there were lots of things broken.

IOW

• ✅ The wrapping <p> isn't a bug.
• ❌The omission of the href is a bug.

Problem

After update and deployment, nodes are edited by client, but when the Source button is hit, href is removed from the html.

Where are the steps to reproduce for this?

This is not reproducible on a fresh Drupal 10.2 install:

vendor/bin/drush site-install standard --yes --quiet --db-url=sqlite://sites/default/files/.ht.sqlite --account-name=root --account-pass=root

followed by going to node/add/page, clicking the "Source" button and pasting

<a href="hello.com">Hello</a>

<p>
    <a href="hello.com">Hello</a>
</p>

Your Text Format contains:

    - insert_block
    - video_embed_wysiwyg

Can you please disable both those filters for a moment?

I need steps to reproduce with only core. From a fresh install 🙏

Oh — one more thing!

We can easily verify whether the incorrect HTML is generated by CKEditor 5, or by the filter system, without even doing #3! 😄

Just go and look at the node__body table for the node you just edited: does that still contain the href?

Issue was narrowed down to IMCE.module - Closing; thanks Wim.

@NikLP can you link to the IMCE issue?

i updated from 10.1.7 to 10.2.0 and, without editing any pages, a lot of my pages' html is broken, with