This is the correct behaviour for an inspector which we probably shouldn't change (again). It is the correct behaviour for editing links, for example.

One solution would be to use dialogs for more complex nodes such as these, however then you woud lose the live preview.

Ultimately the syntax highligter should probably be a dialog which loads a code editor (Ace, CodeMirror, ...), removing the need for a preview (T49742).

I think the ultimate premise here is incorrect -- from the user's perspective, anything that allows data changes, especially in a text field, should preserve the data at all costs. It sounds like "inspector" is something to view but not change the data - in which case it should never allow editing.

No, the act of clicking away from the inspector is dismissive, not constructive like clicking done. This behaviour is identical to google docs and other editors which use inspectors.

In T112617#1645078, @Esanders wrote:

This is the correct behaviour for an inspector which we probably shouldn't change (again). It is the correct behaviour for editing links, for example.

I am not exactly sure here - when editing a link, i would guess the click out should save the change, especially if i was live-previewing it while typing.

@Esanders, I just looked, you are correct that gdocs does that - I was more used to the gmail - which has a dialog box and not an inspector for the link edits. I guess we should look at it as "one line" vs ("multi-line" or several "one liners"), and whenever there are more than a single line change possible, do it as a dialog

Change 247474 had a related patch set uploaded (by Esanders):
WIP Use Ace editor when available

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/247474

Change 247567 had a related patch set uploaded (by Esanders):
Use dialog for editing block level syntax highlights

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/247567

Change 247567 merged by jenkins-bot:
Use dialog for editing block level syntax highlights

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/247567