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!
• Improve spell checking by switching from MySpell to the far-superior HunSpell (this is a direct descendant of MySpell and is the spell checking system now used by new versions of Open Office). There's a list of all the improvements in bug 319778. This may also allow us to ship some dictionaries other than En-US in our localized builds (e.g. Hungarian).
• Grammar checking functionality similar to Spell checking (Grammar mistakes is just as prolific an bad spelling)
• The ability of checking multiple languages in a textarea simultaneously.
• 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.

However we would be breaking the standards, wouldn't we? And i think we shouldn't be trying to do W3C's job.

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).

Use mouse wheel to modify the values

When I'm hovering textarea with number/date and scroll my mouse up/down it should increase/decrease the value.

Automatically restore form with text values filled in if submit fails

After filling in a long email, blog entry etc. and submitting the form, if the subsequent page fails to load (eg because the internet connection was lost when you were typing, or because of a temporary problem with page), instead of just showing an error message firefox should give the user the option to either:

• attempt to submit the data again

or

• return to the previous page with all form items filled in (loaded from offline cache in case internet connection is still down)

or

• provide a separate page or a tab in Page info where the contents of forms that are sent last are shown.

Autofill forms

• Like Opera's Wand or Google's Autofill in the Google Toolbar.
• Have an option to fill in your name, address and other information necessary for many websites into Firefox so that when filling out forms you can click a button that 'autofills' them for you.

Like Internet Explorer - it is best way.

User-created spell check blacklist

• Allow users to specify sites that should not have their text areas spell checked (i.e. sites with HTML editing text areas)

Submit form to new tab/window

• Allow users to submit form buttons to a new tab/window

Change the way the spell checker highlights the misspelled words

User interface consistency is important. I think misspelled words should be underlined with a red zigzag line, much like it's done on all modern text processors, instead of the current dotted line.

Bug17754 Submit forms in a new tab/window (Firefox Extension - Submit To Tab by nrlz)

Automatically pad text area with blank lines

When I am reading a long article, paging down, it is annoying to reach the last page only to find that it is shorter than all the other pages and now my place is lost somewhere in the middle of the screen. I have to hunt for where I left off. I could solve this using the mouse to scroll, and sometimes I do, but I find that more burdensome than just hitting page down. This behavior has existed since the earliest days of the web. It seems to me the easiest way to fix it is for the browser to position the last line of the current page as the first line of the next, no matter what, and fill the rest of the window as needed with blank space. Since I spend most of my web time reading text, consistent text positioning would be a major usability enhancement for me.

Export/Import Saved Form Information and Cookies

Firefox should be capable of exporting and importing a list(s) of saved form information (in the form of a .dat or .txt file) and all cookies (in whatever extension deemed fit form Firefox).

• Perhaps there should be a similar functionality with passwords, if that isn't too much of a breach of personal privacy.