Can I embed HTML formatting inside of a <textarea> tag?

Question

If I have a textarea block like so...

<textarea name="myTextArea" cols="100" rows="20" readonly=readonly>
.. text area content ...
</textarea>

How can I embed HTML formatted text inside this text block? If I can I had figured the following should work...

<textarea name="myTextArea" cols="100" rows="20" readonly=readonly>
<b>Hello how are you today?</b>
</textarea>

As an example. But that sentence does not show up as bold. Maybe I'm just trying to do something that can't be done?

Answer 1

You need to make a WYSIWYG Editor instead.

Here's a great one.

Answer 2

I am pretty sure the answer is no -- cannot do it with a textarea.

Answer 3

Nope! If you validated that in an HTML document, you'd get an error along the lines of "document type does not allow element "b" here".

What you might be looking for is a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editor, which is actually an <iframe> which is making use of a JavaScript feature designMode. It's possible to find tutorials on how to create these, but it's a much, much better idea to use an existing one, as for it to be really useful and usable takes a lot of work.

Take note that - if you were still interested in validation, which you should be if you're working with HTML - is that you won't be able to use a strict DOCTYPE declaration, as the WYSIWYG editor will be using an iframe.

Answer 4

You can do this (convert the "special" characters):

<textarea name="myTextArea" cols="100" rows="20" readonly=readonly>
&lt;b&gt;Hello how are you today?&lt;/b&gt;
</textarea>