Firefox/Feature Brainstorming:Form handling and text areas

« Firefox/Feature Brainstorming

External editing of text boxes

• Allow an external editor (vim, emacs, textpad, etc) to edit text in form text boxes
• Currently supported by plug-ins, but only on some platforms; should be available everywhere
• As more and more apps move towards web services, the ability to effectively edit large blocks of text (wikis, blogs, forums, webmail) becomes more and more critical.
• Include ability to save/restore the text box contents.
• Provide a key binding and also bind to right-click/Edit in text areas.

References

• bug 103767
• bug 13474

Search and replace for editable areas

• Search and replace for textareas and editable iframes

Full featured editing of text areas

Much writing nowadays is done in text areas: wikis, blogs, forums, webmail. Text areas need full featured editing support:

• Unlimited undo/redo.
• Regular expression search and replace.
• Spell checking. Thanks!
• Grammar checking functionality similar to Spell checking (Grammar mistakes is just as prolific an bad spelling)
• Configurable shortcuts and macros.
• Allow easy saving of text area contents on the local machine.
• Automatic safety saves, so that the contents of a text area are never lost.
• Allow resizing of text areas, and splitting into two views.

See also

Life in a TEXTAREA by Adam Rifkin

WYSIWYG Text Area

Enhanced the TEXTAREA tag to provide a WYSIWYG editor that generates HTML code. How many different Javascript, ActiveX, Applet and AJAX solutions exist for this problem? How many of them actually work? None. Let's fix this problem once and do it right. Imagine:

<TEXTAREA NAME="foo" TYPE="wysiwyg">

The user would see a text box with WYSIWYG editing controls. When the form submits, the field would contain HTML code for the user's content. Other browsers would ignore the new flag and display a standard TEXTAREA.

EVERYONE needs this, including this Wiki.

Editable dropdowns

• Enhanced SELECT tag to allow the user to type new values into the dropdown or accept one of the provided options. Examples in abound in real applications but in a form, the only solution is to provide an input box and a comment like "select a value or enter a new one".
• Enhance the SELECT more by allowing HTML in an OPTION. Will allow for images, bold/italic text and much more in an option. (Restriction necessary as e.g. a SELECT in an OPTION doesn't make sense).