[whatwg] Textarea Wishlist

[Edmund Lai]

My wish is that textarea can also be specified as an input element,
i.e. something like
<input type="textarea" ... 
or better yet
<input type="text" display="textarea" ...

The reason is this, let say I want to clear all text fields within a
fieldset, I would do a fieldSetNode.getElementsByTagName('input'), and
then do the clearing, but then I missed all the textareas, so I have
to repeat it for textarea. Sometimes I like the text input and
textarea to be in the right order, then I cannot use
getElementsByTagName at all. Things are much cleaner if textarea
element can be written as input element.

Of course there is still the problem that select element is not an
input element, but that may be harder to deal with.

On Wed, 30 Jun 2004 09:10:21 -0700, Ryan Johnson <ryan at kiwi3.com> wrote:
> 
> This might have already been covered, but I can't get a sense from the
> archives, so I thought I would contribute my wishlist for what I would
> like to be able to do with a textarea element...
> 
> 1) Control the cursor position via scripting.
> 
> 2) Easily preform a regex search, line search, or character search
> (i.e. identify patterns, lines or individual characters), to get the
> position of elements.
> 
> 3) Extensible syntax highlighting (coloring). I am aware that a ton of
> code editors don't even do this well. The ability to load a syntax
> definition file and have it color a block of code would do wonders for
> making the web a more friendly place to script.
> 
> 4) TABS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I don't know how this would
> affect tabbing between forms, but in my opinion, the accessibility
> problem created by not being able to tab out of a text area is far far
> far better than not being able to make a tab character unless you cut
> and paste it in.
> 
> The other thing I was curious about, is if there is some way, in
> between drafts of the specs to see wish lists or ideas? It's kind of
> hard to read all of the archives, and I imagine the list will grow
> quite rapidly in the future... Just My two cents - Ryan
> 
>