Comments on: Ridiculously Cool Comment Tools

By: owen

owen — Mon, 22 Mar 2004 17:28:06 +0000

Shaun Inman site is bitc..but anyway the preview thing is good but I like the link idea, so that people won’t have to figure out the html/bbcode as much. I’ll have to try to get that implemeted at some point.

By: Jennifer Grucza

Jennifer Grucza — Fri, 19 Mar 2004 04:47:08 +0000

Hey, thanks for this article — it’s a great idea, and I probably wouldn’t have come across it if you hadn’t posted about it. I think I’m going to take the same general idea and modify it a bit for my own site.

By: Michael Heilemann

Michael Heilemann — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 22:25:29 +0000

Hey, and thanks for the kind words :)

I’d just like to chime in with the facts before anyone gets the wrong idea: The resizing of the textarea on my blog was 100% inspired by Dunstan’s blog. I’m using it with his permission :)

And yeah, it _is_ a really cool feature, I use it a lot (when I’m not in Safari :)).

By: David House

David House — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 20:31:55 +0000

Dunstan (www.1976design.com/blog) has that Increase | Decrease textfield size widget as well.

By: -jul-

-jul- — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 19:37:19 +0000

I did a small test on my Mac.

Safari 1.2.1: preview OK, resizing doesn’t work, form styling doesn’t work

Opera 7.50 pre3: preview OK, resizing OK, form styling doesn’t work

Firefox 0.8: preview OK, resizing OK, form styling OK

Besides, I tried to cook a browser-based markup handler in JavaScript. It’s like BB tags, but there are a lot of extensions (for example [img “left dotted” /pic/illus.jpg This is a great illustration] generates

This is a great illustration

). JavaScript does this very-very ugly. An hour earlier I would say “client generated preview is good”. This is not true anymore.

By: DarkBlue

DarkBlue — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 15:21:13 +0000

1) I think the controls to increase/decrease the height of the textarea are invaluable and a worthwhile innovation. It’s certainly beneficial to the user.

2) As John Hicks comments above, Omniweb’s textarea editor window seems to be another fantastic and user-friendly feature (although I haven’t seen it myself).

3) But the dynamic preview is not something I enjoy. I find it hugely distracting when writing comments (the animation effect is quite annoying). Also I find my eyes drawn to my scroll bar which is is constantly rescaling everytime word-wrap kicks in, or I hit [enter].

I would also question the usefulness of this, especially if one has a resizable textarea. Surely you can preview as you type in the textarea itself — why do I need to look elsewhere for a preview?

Furthermore, I prefer the server generated preview. This forces you to stop and check and can offer other benefits such as highlighting misspellings, rendering tags, censoring, etc.

Having said all that, I would add that I too love the level of innovation seen in weblogs, it’s great to see the barriers pushed ever higher.

By: Didier Hilhorst

Didier Hilhorst — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 15:18:30 +0000

@Jon

Ugh, you painfully remind me I’m on Windows. I seriously need to get a Mac soon. It’s not that I think Windows is so terrible, it’s more the fact that Apple is just a zillion times more sexy and lickable. I need more lickable stuff!

By: Adam Bramwell

Adam Bramwell — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 15:11:13 +0000

Widgets like these make my day.

By: Jon Hicks

Jon Hicks — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 15:07:27 +0000

Omniweb (Mac OS X browser) has a fantastic feature to help with small textareas. It adds a small button to the top of the scrollbar area, which once clicked, opens up an editor window that you can resize and import text into. I love it!