Question

Can I get an explanation on how to make a wysiwyg editor using a textarea? All I need it to be able to do is parse basic html tags like bold, italics, underline, etc. It doesn’t need to have any buttons that inserts it, I just want to have a default text inside the textarea tags that parse the html.

Example:

<textarea cols="20" rows="20" name="ok">
<b>wat</b>
</textarea>

This will print out <b>wat</b> instead of wat inside the textarea.

Edit: jQuery is preferred

Answer 1

Look into the contenteditable attribute. It’s supported in many modern browsers. Just add it to an element and edit away…

document.getElementById('something').contentEditable = true;

Of course it doesn’t work on textareas. You’d need to swap the textarea out with a div and make that editable. You’d also need to make sure the textarea has the contents (e.g. innerHTML) of the div as its value when the form is submitted.