Textarea as container

[levint]

I wish there would be support for form textarea as a container. It should also degrade gracefully into a normal textarea if ever javascript is disabled. Is this possible?

[OscarGodson]

To help best answer your question, why do you want it to be a textarea and not a contenteditable iframe?

JavaScript is enabled on some ~95% of devices. I'm curious who and what is your use case? This will help me figure out how to help or what to change.

[levint]

Thank you for your fast reply :)

My app (personal project) is a Q&A site similar to stackoverflow (ask questions, answer questions) so the primary method of posting content is through html forms. I want the basic features above to work without javascript just in case there are users who browse with javascript disabled.

[OscarGodson]

This isn't a textarea because you wouldn't be able to do anything neat with a textarea. We're working on cool editing features like what Mou or Byword does. That'd be impossible with a textarea. However, you still need to get content out and that's why the API is there.

You can sync up the changes you make with a textarea super easy so when a form is submitted it'll work like this:
http://jsbin.com/etudol/edit#javascript,html

Type in the editor and you'll see the textarea sync up the content. Obviously, you'd hide the textarea (display: none) on your site. You could check if JS is disabled and if it is you could not hide the textarea so people could type in the textarea directly.

Also, side note, I really wouldn't worry about people with JS disabled. Only ~2% of the US don't have it enabled and that's the highest in the world (see: http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2010/10/how-many-users-have-javascript-disabled/ ) No one disables it anymore because if they did almost all sites would break on them. Worrying about JS disabled people is like worrying for IE5.5 or 4 users ;)

Does that answer all your questions?

Dupe of: #107

[levint]

Thank you for the clarification :) Yes indeed you are correct that we should not worry about javascript being disabled since almost all users have it enabled. I'd take your suggestion regarding synchronization with a hidden textarea.