Giving the user the ability to add information via a textarea and actual format that text as they go along is a popular and powerful tool. Read the resources below for more information:
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Just a thought, if it can be IE only, have a look at the MS dhtml control. It's a very powerful scriptable html design engine (ie. you mark a text, click 'add link' (for example), then the script does a showModal() (IE only again), which displays a windowsy looking input window, and adds the link to the html control, where it is actually displayed as a link. I've even seen a table editor done with this.
--Tyberius Prime
Code example for the ms dhtml control:
code:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>editablepageexample</title>
<script>
function b(){
document.execCommand("Bold", false, null);
}
function i(){
document.execCommand("Italic", false, null);
}
function r(){
document.execCommand("ForeColor", false, "red");
}
</script>
</head>
<body>
<div CONTENTEDITABLE="true">The text in this page is editable.<br></div>
<a href="javascript:b();">bold</a>
<a href="javascript:r();">red</a>
<a href="javascript:i();">italic</a>
<br>
<br>
</body>
</html>
One way to do it is to make one page editable and show that in an iframe, you control the editing functions by buttons/images/links whatever, then on submit you grab the html from the page, strip out the head/body tags, place it in a hidden field that you submit, like this document.forms["your_submit_form_name"].your_hidden_field_name_here.value = window.frames['name_of_your_editor'].document.getElementById("name_of_the_editable_element").documentHTML
Takes some fiddling, but you can make it just about how advanced or simple you like.
//DmS
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Relevant links:
