Modern TextArea's with Formatting???

[dalar]

Hi guys, how are you all,

I am currently in the process of designing a simple messaging system, kind of like an online email system, but its internal...

If you have written an email on Hotmail or Yahoo you might of noticed that when sending an email using Rich text you get a toolbar with formatting icons that allow you change the text, colour bold italics etc...

My question is, how is that done? is it some active x control?? I am confused, especially when you make part of the text, lets say BOLD, the text turns bold straight away, I dont think thats possible with the standard <TEXTAREA> element, or am I wrong?

Many Thanks

[Nate]

Yep, those are called WYSIWYG (and a search on google should bring up plenty of them that you can use for free/buy). They're javascript based, and only work for IE as far as i know.

[new7media]

You might check out Interactive Tools Inc.'s wysiwig editor called htmlarea. It's free to download and use as you want. And it has an active community of users as well as a supported forum where you can post messages. I have used it in a few CMS tools and it works great. I think it works on more than IE. Check out http://www.htmlarea.com/

[dalar]

Thanks alot!! 😃

Thats been buggin me for ages!! 🙂