Firefox/Feature Brainstorming:Form handling and text areas

« Firefox/Feature Brainstorming

Web Forms 2.0 implementation

• Allow using of the extended forms. See the standard made by whatwg, which is located at [1]
• Opera browser partially supports it, you can see how useful it can be in FireFox

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
• Make it embedded in the place of the textarea, without opening another window. Otherwise it would be cumbersome and confusing to keep track of.
• 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.
  • No, this should be in the form of plugins because it isn't possible to make firefox recognize every text-editing program by default. --Armaetin 15:49, 13 February 2007 (PST)

References

• bug 103767
• bug 13474

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.
• 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.

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.

• This should be optional for those who don't want to accidentally change values when scrolling up or down a page. --Armaetin 15:49, 13 February 2007 (PST)

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.
• With Firefox 2, login form fields are only filled in with the login information stored in password manager after loading of the entire page has completed. However, form fields (in particular for login) should be rendered before any other elements on a page, because often all you want to do on a login page is ... to log in. But instead, rendering of a login page often hangs because billions of annoying ad servers take forever to reply to client requests. Rendering (login) forms and filling in the login information first would allow for immediate login, without having to wait until rendering of the whole page is complete -- also contributing to save bandwith, as requests to the billions of annoying ad servers would not be send, or at least cancelled immediately.

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)

[added:stk 10-mar-07] I concur that changing the way the spell checker highlights misspelled words would be a good thing. (Been trying to hack a way, but unsuccessful, so far).

1px dotted red is just a tad too difficult for these old (48ish) eyes to see. Been looking for a way to change text color (magenta, like google-spell does) ... or bg color ... SOMETHING more prominent.

Which leads to another idea - make such behaviors user-set-able in some advanced behaviors tab (including option to point to other user-defined, specialty dictionaries - e.g., Word custom.dic, etc.)?

• I also agree that the spellchecker's highlighting should be changed, although that isn't as high of a priority as many of the other excellent features Firefox still needs. I also agree that the spellchecker's color should be changed to the will of the user, even though I already like red because it parallels with that of MS Word's. By the way, stk, advanced user preferences can be accessed by typing about:config in the address bar, and dictionaries are "stored" in a file named persdict.dat. --Armaetin 11:39, 10 March 2007 (PST)

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.

Drag and dropping files into textboxes

• Allow users to drag and drop a local text/HTML file into a text box to insert the content of the file instead of its path.

Thesaurus and Form Information Spell Check

I like Firefox's spellchecker, and it reminds me of Microsoft Office's own language tools and auto-correct features, especially of the thesaurus:

• When you right-click a word in a text area, there should be a submenu (similarly to the "Language" submenu) that lists the synonym of the right-clicked word.
• A submenu for antonyms, as per the synonyms in the previous bullet.
• Form information boxes (including search input areas) should have an optional spellcheck feature, using the same dictionaries as the text area dictionary. This should be off by default in Firefox.
• An easier way to edit and update Firefox's dictionary without manually going into persdict.dat.

Clipboard: A Modified Copy/Paste Functionality

What a clipboard would do:

• Firefox should add all objects we copy into a clipboard.
• The clipboard is accessible via a sidebar.
• Double-clicking an entry on the clipboard pastes the item, if appropriate.
• The clipboard is cleared after every session.
• A user can "merge" items on the clipboard. What this means is that a user can select multiple items on the clipboard (the same way multiple icons are selected on a desktop: using the Ctrl/Cmd key) and consolidate them into one item. This is for simplicity purposes, ie a user wants to paste everything on Firefox's clipboard into an external application.

Notes:

• Ideally, a clipboard should hold as many entries as possible.
• Unlike the floating clipboard in Microsoft Office programs, the clipboard should behave as a sidebar or toolbar.
• The clipboard does not affect copy and paste in any way. It merely pastes all instances of copying into its memory. Pasting an item from the clipboard merely copies the item from the history and pastes it, as if the user did it manually.
• The order of the items on a clipboard can be sorted via up/down buttons.

Allow specified textareas to expand with the size of the window

When editing large text, such as email, wiki, code and others, it is convenient to have the as large as possible an area to view it through. But when the browser window itself is too small, you end up with two horizontal and/or two vertical scrollbars. It wold be great if some specified text areas and text boxes could expand and contract with the size of the window.

• I agree, and I also think Firefox should give users the option of having the ability to manually set how large certain fields are. --Armaetin 22:57, 22 January 2007 (PST)

Form Information Spellchecker

There should be a spellchecker for form information and search boxes.

• This should be optional because most form information boxes are probably for usernames (and therefore usually not of correct spelling) or passwords (there are many reasons why some people would be uncomfortable with the idea of spellchecker looking into password boxes).
• The spellchecker for form information boxes should use the same dictionaries used by the text boxes (including persdict.dat).

Record and Play Macros

Some forms require clicking a series of routine "submit" buttons. Some of the button-clicking has to do with accepting security certificates. It's good that Firefox can remember the user IDs and passwords. It'd be better if Firefox allows us to "record" the sequence of button clicking as a macro files, and allows us (end users, not Web masters) to replay those macro files with a single click of a button.

Show link to open target

When the pointer or focus is on a link to a page that is already open in the browser, show the link visually as a line from the source to the target. When a link to an anchor is followed, flash a circle around the anchor on the page. This fixes two common problems: not knowing where the link is supposed to follow, if the page is too short to be scrolled, and not seeing the context before the link because if the page scrolls the anchor to the first line.

Annotations

Allow the browser to make annotations of arbitrary parts of text and published them as web pages. Publishing will require servers, which can be provided by volunteers initially, and businesses when the concept is proven.

• How would you be able to get companies to go along with this? Most corporations would be afraid people would attach annotations to their pages and start spamming. Also, how would you address some pages that are collectively represented by one URL?

Zoom

Allow the user to zoom in and out of the page, increasing and decreasing all content, including text, images and flash.

• What do yow mean? Zoom in and out as in Ctrl++ and Ctrl+- or as in to some sort of dock?