One of the things I do is create dynamic content interfaces for web sites. But standard web forms are limiting for text editing. I had originally tried to implement additional textarea functionality using Javascript but was limited by cross browser functionality due to DOM not being well supported in Netscape 4 if not at all and an annoying bug in Mozilla.

I would have thought that a DOM HTML bug would have been fixed before 1.0 or even 1.1 but in the open source world priorities are not always based on important bugs but rather what programmers feel like fixing. Not like I can complain much, I know how to program but haven't tried to fix these bugs myself. Too much of a pain to get into C++ and learn the intricacies of Mozilla code. Bug I'm rambling.

So, I thought, why not do it in Flash? Turns out there are two good starts on this. Josh Dura has a Flash text editor and so does Stuart Schoneveld although Stuart's is not available to download and therefore tweak and use. It's too bad since Stuart's has a link option that Josh's doesn't yet have.

So I'll have to stretch my limited Flash muscles to plug in a link bar into Josh's editor and solve some issues I noticed. First, the text field in the editor seems to only update it's associated variable with formatting information after more data is entered. So just calling setTextFormat won't apply it to the variable right away. The second thing is that the HTML stored in the variable has the tag <textarea%gt; which last time I checked is not standard HTML. Small details to fix.

Timothy Appnel had some good ideas on Flash based editors.