formatting & smiles placement suggestion

[boatdesign]

1.) First, the easy one. When you click on one of the smiles from the smiles box, it is always inserted at the end of the message. It would seem to make more sense if it was inserted where your cursor was positioned in the message.

2.) Now the difficult one. The formatting tools (bold, italic, underline, etc.) are a bit unintuitive. How difficult would it be to make it so you could highlight text in the message and hit [B] and it was bold? (like in a typical application that everyone is familiar with?) I believe that Yahoo Mail has this interface...

[tubedogg]

Originally posted by boatdesign
1.) First, the easy one. When you click on one of the smiles from the smiles box, it is always inserted at the end of the message. It would seem to make more sense if it was inserted where your cursor was positioned in the message.

Not possible.

2.) Now the difficult one. The formatting tools (bold, italic, underline, etc.) are a bit unintuitive. How difficult would it be to make it so you could highlight text in the message and hit [B] and it was bold?

It would be possible but likely only in IE using a Windows specific setup.

[Kier]

The cursor position or selected text within a <textarea> is not exposed for scripting by any browser, so both of these suggestions are impossible to implement at the present time.

[Wayne Luke]

I have to agree. It is completely and totally impossible to do in a textarea box with today's browsers...

However, I disagree that it is impossible. It is possible in Internet Explorer 5+...

http://www.yearahead.com/edit/edit.html

Time to think out of the box.

[Kier]

Sorry... I phrased my post badly while I was in a hurry...

I really meant to say that there is no agreed standard for the position of the cursor/selection within a textarea - but as wluke points out, there are proprietry technologies out there that allow this sort of thing, they just aren't cross-browser-compatible enough to be considered for inclusion in a product such as vBulletin.

[boatdesign]

wluke: exactly the type of interface I was looking at -- it's pretty nice! Very similar to the rich text interface in Yahoo's mail, and I think it's much easier, especailly for new users.

Kier: most of the times, I think it's great to have good competition between the browsers. But somtimes, like in this instance, when IE is so far ahead of the others in functionallity, I wish that the first rock-solid working technology would just be adopted and become the standard rather than having to wait years for an official standard to be created which offers the same things which IE offers now. I say, first to invent something that works great and is used by 70% of internet users = the standard. But I know things are never that simple

I do see that Yahoo's mail does work with both IE and NS. With NS you just don't get the cool interface, but you can of course enter the tags manually. I guess it would be pretty difficult to have that interface for IE users but default to the standard for Netscape users?