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Textareas Suck

03 Jun 2004 by Ryan Singer

Why the Lucky Stiff, in another fit of off-the-wall anthropomorphization, says Textarea, You Are A Sunken Nothing and I agree wholeheartedly.

Note: If you’re using Mozilla or Firebird on Windows or *nix (no Mac yet), you can install Mozex to edit textareas with your favorite text editor.

8 comments so far (Post a Comment)

03 Jun 2004 | Arne Gleason said...

It really is too bad that someone wasnt more ambitious when it came to defining the standard set of HTML form controls that weve been stuck with. They really are weak and have been the root of many convoluted form schemes (and endless reinvention to solve common problems).

03 Jun 2004 | Ned Baldessin said...

On MacOS X, OmniWeb 5 (beta 6.1) partly solves the problems of textareas : they have an small inobstrusive "+" icon in the upper right corner, that opens a separate editing window, so you can import and print text. Very uncluttered and neat.

03 Jun 2004 | Randy said...

How about the W3C folks stop focusing on CSS crap and instead start getting the basics SUCH AS TEXTAREAS right.

04 Jun 2004 | Mat said...

I'd say that there a quite a lot more websites concerned about 'CSS crap' than textareas actually. Many sites wouldn't have even one form on them.

Although I do agree that the textarea is a painful piece of functionality.

04 Jun 2004 | Nick Mracek said...

I want a change in the way passwords and authentication in general is presented. There has to be a better way. Passwords aren't that hard to remember but when you have to remember at least 50+ then it gets bothersome. There should be a way, you have one secure login and it allows you to navigate freely all the phpBB and newspapers in the world you subscribe to. This would help a lot of peoples sanity, not just my own.

04 Jun 2004 | kev said...

Nick, it's called identity federation. and it's coming.

08 Jun 2004 | Jon Gales said...

Or it's called Keychain and it's here (on Mac OS X).

08 Jun 2004 | Mark said...

The textarea rant bores me. Textareas aren't great, but they're not as bad as all that.

You can do search and replace in them... If you have a real browser (Opera). If people keep using stupid browsers, they deserve what they get.

You can add all sorts of editing features, if you use javascript. And yes, this can be done in a portable fashion, if you exclude the people with crappy 5-year-old browsers. See any web forum for examples. It's not rocket science. Cheap, lazy web designers don't bother to use the tools that already exist, and then complain that the basic components aren't very good. Because complaining is sure to fix the problems. Doing something yourself, that's too much like work.

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