I'm wanting to provide a resizing textarea control for users. I've given this a go and looked at a number of other implementations, but I can't seem to find one that meets all my requirements. Specifically I want a control that:
Works in IE6, IE7, IE8 on Windows and Firefox 3 and 3.5 on Windows and OS X when the page is rendered in standards compliant mode (i.e. not in quirks mode).
Does not mess up the undo buffer/undo stack. This is a particularly nasty issue with IE - adding nodes, removing nodes and some other DOM operations will reset the input buffer meaning that if an implementation relies on these techniques an undo will not behave like it does in a standard textarea control. I haven't been able to find much information about this bug except for this note. Implementations like the jQuery Auto Growing Plugin suffer from this problem - try undoing changes in IE and compare how this works to a standard textarea. I've added an example page demonstrating this problem to JSBin.
Has a maximum height beyond which the control cannot grow.
Shrinks appropriately when content is deleted.
Does not flicker or act strangely on keypress. e.g. jQuery Auto Growing Textarea control behaves strangely with, at least IE7, when the control has grown beyond it's initial size.
Does not require the control to use a fixed-width/monospace font.
The closest I've seen to something that works like this is Facebook's status update field, which is implemented as a content editable div element, but I have some reservations about using such an element because using a div means:
Need to explicitly style the border which means we could end up with a border that looks different to a native textarea.
Need to sync content with the real textarea (possibly in both directions?).
Adds complexity when placing hints and other elements relative to position of a textarea.
While this approach works for something like a Facebook status update, how well would it work in a form containing hundreds of standard input elements?
What I've set out above represents the "ultimate resizing textarea" - addressing what I perceive to be issues with existing approaches. Does such a control exist? Is it possible to write such a control?
Check out DOJO tools text area control
see more on this demo page (text area At the end of the form )
This closely come to your requirements.
You may need to roll your own to meet those requirements.
These could be a start.
http://tuckey.org/textareasizer/ (though try and avoid eval() in yours)
http://www.felgall.com/jstip45.htm
http://viralpatel.net/blogs/2009/06/textarea-resize-javascript-jquery-plugin-resize-textarea-html.html
This actually seems like a good jQuery plugin. I might have a tackle at developing something like this. If I get it done, I'll post it here.
I spent a few hours developing something, but then I found this one that seems to be really good.
http://www.aclevercookie.com/demos/autogrow_textarea.html
You want to auto-size the display? but leave the content the same?
That is all the scripts can do, adjust the display, and let you see more of your own text...
This A List Apart post contains an implementation that looks pretty close to meeting your criteria and contains a good explanation of what's going on.
Are any of these useful?
Textarea Resize JavaScript: Resize textarea using jQuery plugin
Smart Area: A Lightweight Resizing Text Area Plugin for jQuery
How to Build an Auto-Expanding Textarea jQuery Plugin, Part 1
How to Build an Auto-Expanding Textarea jQuery Plugin, Part 2
How to Build an Auto-Expanding Textarea jQuery Plugin, Part 3
Resizable Body
I have been using nicEdit. It seems to have all that you need and the script is only 1700 lines with an MIT license so you could make any changes you need.
Related
I'm in the process of making an HTML text parser and I would like to be able to determine when a text node appears as a header (visually, not HTML headers).
One thing that can usually be said about headers are that they are emphasized - usually in one of two ways: Bold font or larger font size.
I could get both corresponding CSS values using getComputedStyle(), but I want to avoid this because the parser needs high performance (has to run smoothly on, for example, Chromebooks) and getComputedStyle() is not particularly fast when looking through hundreds or thousands of nodes.
Figuring out a font size isn't too hard - I can just select the node with range and check its client rects from range.getClientRects().I haven't figured out a smart way to check font weight though, which is why I'm here.
Can anyone think of higher-performance way of doing this than by using getComputedStyle()?
I'm aware this might not be possible - just looking to see if someone can think of an ingenious way to solve this problem.
Edit
This is for a Google Chrome extension only.
What you're aiming to do here is really messy. Since you want to determine if text is bold visually, on some devices, depending on how they render text, the whole system may just break!
A suggestion I have is to use the HTML5 Data atrributes - find out more here - and use it like so:
<div class="header" data-bold="yes">This will appear bold?</div>
Then, using JavaScript you can just go over all div elements with the data-bold attribute.
I hope this helped ;)
I always come to stackoverflow to check for answers; however, for the current question I have not found any relevant information yet.
I have a Mobile Windows 6.1 PDA and I want to create a simple HTML page for it. I want specific divs of the page to have a specific height, based on the text that are inside these divs.
Maximum I want 2 rows of text.
The text can contain HTML code. I want to slice the text but do not hurt the HTML code.
Before you think "there are 100 different solutions with CSS or Javascript for this" I would like to mention that 6.1 uses a mixture of IE4 with some features of IE5. The browser supports only CCS1 (so no max-height, no overflow:hidden, no position: absolute, no top, bottom etc).
Also the browser supports a very limited range of Javascript functions. I thought to parse the DOM of Javascript and constantly check if the text inside the div is bigger than 28pt (this is two rows) and cut it. However, most of the DOM functions do not work. createElement() does not work, appendChild either. Only getElementById and innerHTML work.
I found this solution https://code.google.com/p/cut-html-string/ for Javascript, which works perfectly with modern browsers, however, since it contains functions such createElement(), appendChild(), cloneNode() etc. it does not work with IE4. Work-around to the createElement() is the innerHTMl which works perfectly but then the browser reports errors for the DOM functions that the code uses.
P.S: Please do not answer "change PDA etc.". I know that the OS is very old but I have to use it.
Ok so if your only dealing with 1 style of device could you use a javascript viewport sniff maybe and use the inner html adjustments to adjust to a new style sheet so that you can have it work for said device, if you have to program for multiple devices you can create multiple style sheets. I would advise for testing purposes to see if anyone has an android or iOs device with similar screen sizes so you can use something like edge inspect from adobe creative cloud that you can adjust and see the changes.
Someone has a thing on viewport find here
Find the exact height and width of the viewport in a cross-browser way (no Prototype/jQuery)
that may be of use.
Since your dealing with basic javascript you should just be able to change the address of a css link and that may be a solution. If i mistook any of the functionality of the device im sorry however it has been a while since I had a windows mobile 6.x phone.
I've been looking into creating a Rich Text editor, and at first I was planning on using contentEditable, but it turns out the results are extremely inconsistent and that the output HTML is often broken.
I was wondering if there are any alternatives to using contentEditable, such as the way Google Docs does it (they created there own engine).
Even Google Docs are built on contentEditable. They, however, use it in a different way most editors out there do.
When you focus the document area, it just seems like it is focused because of the fake caret. The actual focus goes to an <iframe> with keyboard event listeners set up. The engine (kix) then modifies the document area based on the keys you press.
This is awesome because there are really no serious cross-browser inconsistencies as the browser is not the one modifying the DOM.
The only alternative I can think of might be a simple text input instead of a contentEditable element but why bother with issues like max length when you can just take advantage of contentEditable ;-)
Why not give TinyMCE a go? It is quite good and fairly refined - just need to combine it with PHP and you can save the contents :)
How do I go about getting text content to carryover to a dynamically created column to it's right when the window height is reduced?
Basically this:
Is there any jquery/other plugins out there that can do this?
I hit the wall while working on a horizontally scrolling website, and this has been haunting me and driving me crazy for the past month. I guess, the madness had clogged my mind to allow proper research.
There's treesaver.js http://demo.nomadeditions.com/wide-screen/#-/wide-screen/oscar-bloggers.html; it works fine in IE9, but wouldn't even load in IE8 (I checked on IEtester so chances are it could be incorrect). The only problem I have with treesaver is it's constant re-loading whenever the window's resized but that's just a pet peeve.
It would be nice if this can be done in css itself; this trivial issue really shouldn't need a javascript plugin, but the wide array of browsers(along with their own quirkiness') used in the market forces me to dip my hand in the js basket first.
What you are asking for is currently a W3C candidate reccomendation
http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-multicol/
You can see it in action here:
http://www.quirksmode.org/css/multicolumn.html
The bad news is it's not supported by IE 8 even in standards mode. I don't have IE 9 available here, but if this is a public site, you probably can't require IE 9 yet anyway.
Take a look at the text effects in http://www.jwf.us/projects/jQSlickWrap/
I need to build a wysiwyg editor for a project I am working on and need some guidance. Some of my key points of confusion are the following:
iframe docs vs. contenteditable divs: which one should I use and why? I hate iframes, is there a clear advantage to using iframes?
cross browser styling: execCommand seems to apply different styles in different browsers. Are there any tricks to making this cross-browser compatible? Should I not use execCommand at all and instead apply my own styles?.
adding items to the undo chain: how can run my own script, such as inserting an image, and allow cntrl+z (undo) to remove it? Is there an array of undo/redo items for contenteditable that I can push items into?
keeping the text selection: how I can maintain text selection while making operations such as selecting the font style, where the focus will leave and remove my selection. Rangy? Google closure? Are there other range/selection libraries worth looking at?
Any tips on these items or anything else related to building a rich text editor would be greatly appreciated!
From personal experience, I recommend against doing this unless your aim is to provide a very limited amount of functionality. The sheer number of browser differences and the complexity of their workarounds makes this a very tricky and time-consuming task if you want to do it well.
If that hasn't put you off, here's my thoughts on your individual questions:
iframe docs vs. contenteditable divs
I recommend the iframe approach, for two main reasons:
You have complete control over the document type, CSS and script within the iframe. This is essential if you want consistent behaviour and appearance and want to use your editor within different pages.
Firefox in particular is quite buggy with contenteditable elements, which they only introduced relatively recently (version 3.0) while designMode has existed on documents for many years (since pre-1.0; around 0.6, if memory serves) and works pretty well.
cross browser styling
If it's important for you to have uniform results from applying styles in different browsers then in general you will need to write your own styling code. However, doing this will break the built-in undo stack and you will need to implement your own undo/redo system.
adding items to the undo chain
There's no programmatic way to interact with the built-in browser undo stack. You'll need to write your own.
Update November 2012
There is a spec in the works for custom undo/redo so this is likely to be possible eventually. Here are the relevant bugs for Mozilla and WebKit.
keeping the text selection
I have to declare my interests here, since I wrote Rangy. I don't think there's a better library out there that does a similar job; Google Closure does have a range/selection API but I think it uses their own proprietary interface rather than emulating DOM Range and common browser Selection objects. IERange is another library that is similar in idea to Rangy but much less fully realized and seemingly abandoned immediately after release by its author.
Don't, seriously don't.
What you are suggesting is a major undertaking. You really should be looking at TinyMCE, http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/, or CKEditor, http://ckeditor.com/. Getting what you are after is a massive amount of effort to get working for one version of one browser, to make it portable will take man-years of investment.
A better solution is to look at things like TinyMCE's plugins, http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/plugins.php. You can get your basics the basics (and portability for free) and concentrate on adding the specific value-add items you need to.