Stylizing text .. inside a form?

This forum seems to be good for Javascript question, so I'll try my luck here with another one.

I want to be able to stylize text inside a <textarea> tag.

Like how Yahoo! mail have little buttons that you can click and it would change ur font to bold right away and u can see it if u type something.

Not add a "< b >" tag infront of the text.

I have searched a few forums for this, and the general answer seems to be you cant stylize text in textarea. But since I have seen it done 1000x times by sites such as Yahoo!, Xanga, I know its possible.

Can anyone help?

Thanks.

Search for HTMLArea in yahoo or google, is the best solution I know about.

Well, text can be "stylized" in text areas via CSS as I did here:
http://cigloans.com/apply.html

But that doesn't appear to be what you are looking for. If I understand what you are askig, you seem to be looking for a WYSIWYG type text box where the user sees the end result as they type the post.

I haven't a clue how to do that, but I just wanted to clarify it for others because I think that's what you're asking for.

yeah .. I think you put it in much better word than I did Atno. Thats what I am looking for.

a WYSIWYG type text box where users see the end result as they type the post, not the actually code.

And LEO, great link. I am still reading through the code to see if i can apply that to my system, but thanks alot, that helps a bunch.

I know "what you mean" has been scrutinized ad nauseum. But, I think what I've got to say is sort of pseudo code a solution.

Basically what I think you need is for a button in the window to call a javascript function that will add text properties (ie <b>) to the user's input. To do that wouldn't be all that hard. You'd capture the user's input and turn it into a string. Add the desired text property (<b>) to the string, and write it back to the <textarea>

I mean maybe I oversimplified it. Maybe I'm just missing the point. But, it seems to me that that would work.

Feeling like an idiot b/c I didn't use the in my last post. DUH!

Thanks for everyone's help. What I ended up doing was intergrating HTMLArea into my code.

That seems to be a great system as is so I didnt want to reinvent the wheel while I am not even sure I can do close to as good a job.

Best of all, HTMLArea is free too.

That HTMLArea is pretty nice, except it only works for IE. What about those who use Mozilla or maybe another browser like myself. There are a lot of users who are switching over to Mozilla and you can't forget about them.