To reproduce:

• Create a task with leading newlines in the task description.
• Use "Edit Task" to adjust any other field.

Apparently this is just how <textarea> works. Here's a test case in WebKit explicitly testing this behavior:

http://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/LayoutTests/fast/forms/textarea-newline.html?rev=82656

Here's discussion of this issue in Rails, although it's open source so it's 9000 pages long of people yelling at each other and I can't figure out what actually happened:

https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/393

I think this is the fix, which just adds a "\n" at he beginning:

https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/a4e4d2855bbad1c1400fb89ba663f7193d76dc10

...although this was later reverted and replaced with crazy nonsense with approximately the same effect because of something called "HAML":

https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/33164c8f1479b826a044ab90f4cc2439666e4b16

...which persists to this day:

https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/actionview/lib/action_view/helpers/tag_helper.rb#L25

So it's probably fine to just do that.

Nice.