Adam @ Bitscribe

Consider for a moment the html form element for entering multi-line text:

<textarea>...</textarea>

Not much to look at, is it?

Hard to believe, but this little widget is fast supplanting the word processor as the tool with which most of humankind’s writing is done. Just as the word processors supplanted the typewriter, the typewritter the pen, and the pen the quill.

Think of all the places where one writes using textarea. Blogging, Writely and friends, site comments, feedback forms, message forums, GMail, and user profiles on community sites like Tribe, to name a few. Even the internal tool I use at work for creating project designs involves writing in a textarea.
What’s astonishing, then, is just how lame the textarea widget is. I’m pretty sure that Notepad has it beat out for features and usability. Scary, that.

I think the attitude thus far - and my attitude until just recently - was that textarea is just a multi-line version of <input type=text>. If you were trying to use it for any serious writing, you’re doing it wrong.

Sure, you and I know that for any serious writing you should use a real editor, then cut-and-paste the results into a textarea. For example I’m writing this in vim, to later be pasted into the textarea of my blogging software. But this is a haphazard and error-prone approach. One can accidentally cut and pasted too much or too little, for example. And then what if you want to edit it? Back to the original text file, delete the contents of the text area, and then cut and paste again? Or edit in place in the textarea, the very thing we were trying to avoid to begin with?

People not in the know about text editing tools - that is to say, 99% of computer users - just muddle by with textarea. They don’t know any better, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t feeling the hurt. Improving textarea’s capabilities would make everyone’s lives better, not just power users.

The other thing that gets my goat is the quantity of time an energy put into javascript rich text editors. Countless web applications, realizing the importance of decent editing capabilities, have sought to create their own or integrate an open source rich text editor. A few notables including GMail (which includes the very important feature of autosaving drafts) and WordPress. But these tend to be quirky, slow to load, and difficult to make work cross-browser. More significantly though, is that the application developers are spending huge amounts of time developing and maintaining a method for text entry, which seems like massive duplicated (and thus wasted) effort to me.

Everyone needs to have decent editing capabilities whenever they enter text. Why not just build it into the browser?

Partial attempts have been made, so I’ll mention a few of the notables here. One of the first ones that really caught my eye - and got me thinking about this - was automatic spellchecking, introduced into Konqueror a few years back. I was amazed by how much this improved my web writing experiences right away. Prior to having it, I think there was a small part of my brain that was constantly worried about whether I was spelling this or that word wrong and making myself look like an uneducated yokel. But any such thoughts were being squelched by the pragmatic concerns of cutting and pasting the text into Ispell or OpenOffice. So I had this constant little game of stress going on in my head - gone the moment Konqueror started highlighting my misspelled words in red. (I understand that Firefox 2 will be adding this feature as well.)

The honorable mention goes to KVim, which alas appears to be a dead project. This is a KPart (a pluggable component of the KDE architecture) that, when activated, caused most of KDE’s text widgets (including Konqueror’s textarea) to turn into a vim editor. Unfortunately the usefulness of this is limited for obvious reasons, but this is the closest browsers have ever come to having a non-sucky textarea widget.

More on the rich text side than the power-editing side is the clumsily-named Xinha Here Firefox plugin. Regrettably this is not inline; you have to right click and select “Open Xinha Here”, at which point a window pops up to offer an advanced editor. When you save, the results are pasted back into the textarea. More convenient than an external editor, but still far from the seamless solution we need.

So come on folks, let’s collectively come to grips with the fact that textarea is the most important editor of the future. Time to make it, you know, good.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 7th, 2006 at 5:24 am and is filed under UI, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.