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A couple of enhancements

Published by MadMan August 4th, 2004 in Web World

Aloha.

As the de facto webmaster of this site, I keep making minor improvements to this site, mostly at the instance of the pester-power of the markup-challenged owner. :)

All comment boxes on AnarCapLib now have a formatting toolbar that let you write some HTML to format your comments.

Here’s a bonus for you readers: there are still plenty of blogs out there that don’t have a similar feature. I have just the thing for you. If you’re using Internet Explorer, drag this next link to your “links” bar:

href="javascript:(function(){var d=document,i,f,j,t,m,s,u,q;for(i=0;f=d.forms[i];++i)for(j=0;t=f[j];++j)if(t.tagName=="TEXTAREA"&&!t.htmlarea){t.htmlarea=1;t.style.display="none";m=d.createElement("div");m.contentEditable=true;m.innerHTML=t.value;s=m.style;s.overflow="scroll";s.width=500;s.height=250;s.border="2px inset green";t.parentNode.insertBefore(m,t);u=U(m,t);setInterval(u,50);f.attachEvent("onsubmit",u);if(q=f.posttype)q.selectedIndex=1;}function U(m,t){return function(){t.value=m.innerHTML}}})()">HTML-edit

When you go to a blog (or any other site with a comment box), clicking that link will turn the plain ol’ box into an HTML-enriched WYSIWYG editor, where you can press Ctrl-B, Ctrl-I, and Ctrl-K (among other things) to get bold, italics, and hyperlinks respectively. Go on, give it a shot. (And ignore the warning about the link being possibly unsafe blah blah.)

You’re welcome.

Update: Just for Ravages, who asked for a spell-checker, I give you IESpell, a free extension to IE that does exactly that.

9 Responses to “A couple of enhancements”  

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  1. 1 anya Aug 4th, 2004 at 9:02 am

    hey this is neat .. the script inserts html tags as i can see :-P .. unfortunately i dont use IE. Does it work for mozilla too? I should if its javascript .. i am too lazy to try it out .. u tell me.

  2. 2 Yazad Aug 4th, 2004 at 10:01 am

    Why just de facto? You’re the de jure webmaster as well :-)

    And yes pester power has it’s uses!

  3. 3 MadMan Aug 4th, 2004 at 10:52 am

    Anya, thanks to a Mozilla bug, it doesn’t work in that browser.

  4. 4 Ashwin Aug 5th, 2004 at 7:58 am

    isn’t it supposed to be the other way round ? because of an IE loophole, you can use it.

  5. 5 MadMan Aug 5th, 2004 at 9:50 am

    Ashwin, that’s not true.

    The document.createRange() implementation is broken in Mozilla. It can’t manipulate text in an input element or textarea element. It is actually part of the W3C DOM specs.
    See:
    http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Traversal-Range/ranges.html#Level-2-Range-Creating

  6. 6 Sathish Aug 5th, 2004 at 6:48 pm

    Good Job. :)

  7. 7 Ravages Aug 6th, 2004 at 9:42 am

    You ought to put in a spell checker in this too
    I might have use for it :)

  8. 8 Ravages Aug 6th, 2004 at 1:33 pm

    Writing this from Mozilla’s Firefox and the edit bar is visible.

    Am checking the bold function and the italics, but they don’t seem to work though

  9. 9 Nilu Aug 9th, 2004 at 3:29 am

    Hey Yazad,
    Saw how pathetically Rape Sheild laws failed?.

    I think this is the single biggest proof - but for being a libertarian, mankind has little choice ;)

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