So after getting a number of formatting-related requests, I decided it was time to simplify the process of posting rich-text comments/problems/solutions/forum posts. To that end, I have done some research on the topic, and found this:

http://www.kevinroth.com/rte/demo.htm

Let me know if this souped up text area works in your browser, and what you think about me making it a standard on the site.

suuuwwwweeeeetttt !

I think it looks pretty good. The font style, font, and size boxes could be replaced with just a button (like the buttons for bold or italics) to use a fixed-width font, and text highlighting could probably be removed (to preserve the current format of the site). Also, the box automatically replaces repeated spaces with the   character, which is nice. The 'view source' button is a must. Buttons for subscript and superscript would be very useful as well.

Thanks DJ. I see now that the "view source" also allows editing source, and the shift-return works as well, just as you say.

While the GUI is nice, it doesn't do everything. One of the biggest shortcomings in not being able to edit the source directly is with the special characters (see my testing thread), which I use quite often -- the existing buttons for the HTML codes are rather lacking, and very limited in selection.

Also, having to enter every comment using the GUI would be extremely annoying. First, I don't ever enter a comment directly into the box on the site, I type it up first in notepad (for many problems, the ability to search/replace text is invaluable) and paste it in. If that were pasted into the GUI, I might as well have not done anything.

If you're worried about closed tags, the script for the text-edit box automatically closes any tags that are left open anyway (if you type in "<i>hello", it will output "<i>hello</i>").

I found an inconsistancy between flooble and the editor. The editor uses EM (embellishment) tags for italics, but flooble requires I tags for italics.

The reason I'm familiar with the one you suggested is that the same basic control is used on xanga.com, where I have a weblog. Other nice features that are that the key commands ctrl-i, -b, and -u work for formatting as they normally would within a word processor.

I prefer to just type in the HTML tags; I imagine most people will prefer the GUI. As far as rogue tags, as you put it, I'm sure you could change the existing filtering method to get rid of any <img> or <embed> or other potentially abusive tags, rather than delimiting the tags that you specifically want to allow. There are very good preexisting codes to do this on the PHP website, and since PHP is server-side, you can run all those checks after the control form is submitted. To me, that seems like the best way to allow full use of the test-edit box and still prevent abuse.

Wow, that looks very good!
Glad to see that you still love us after all this time... ;)

I think I spotted that one while I was looking for a suitable candidate. However I didn't want to use it since it was IE only...

In any case, I made some more tweaks to the one I likned before - you can now see the result of a submission. I would appreciate it if you guys could test it out with some of your more interesting comments to see if it works well or not.

Let me know if you run into any weirdness. If not, hopefully I will start putting it into the site around next weekend.

Hmm... On my mozilla it uses SPAN for all the styling, so I didn't bother "allowing" STRONG and EM.

I'm going to enable them now, let me know if the results come out any better.

It looks good for the bold and italic, except that clicking on a button such as that (to precede typing bold/italic -- or non-bold after bold/italic) most of the time removes the focus from the text box, rather than allow continuation of the typing in the new face. When swiping previously typed text this isn't too important, but if one is going along typing, and wants to prepare for bold by clicking the button, having the focus lost from the text box is disconcerting.

(By the way, the title bar says Rich Tect Edit Demo rather than Rich Text Edit Demo.)

Charlie - I changed the behavior to "focus-back" on the edit area after one of the buttons is pressed - hopefully it will work, let me know if there are other "behavioral" issues.

DJ - good catch on the ***script tags. Will go add them now. About the OL, I didn't think it needed a button. UL is by far the more used, and anyone needing OL will probably know what they're doing enough to go and add one manually. Like you :)