IE, textarea value is not changed when pressing buttons

Question

I have an realy nasty problem with focus in internet explorer.

I have a textarea for inputing text. This textarea is not visible for the user and is only used to provide robust text input for a more advanced view.

As the textarea isn't visible and shouldn't be i use textarea.focus() in the javascript to activate text-input. This has worked fine until now where i get really wierd results.

For the textinput i basically use this event plus an exact copy for onkeypress.

textarea.onkeyup = function (e) {
        //textarea.value contains the full text
        //Update the view with this value
};

The problem is that sometimes textarea.value is not updated. I can even see the button in e.keyCode on the keyup event above but the value isn't changed. This seems to happen after i have clicked somewhere on the page, but this does not trigger a blur-event. I'm logging the onfocus- and onblur-events so i can see when the textarea looses focus but it doesnt. And i still receive the keyup/press/down events.

If i try to refocus the textarea with textarea.focus() the problem remains. A workaround i found though is to focus the window with window.focus() and right after call textarea.focus(). The problem with this is that focus is a really expensive operation in IE (no kidding) and since i cannot detect when this problem will happen i have to keep doing it with certain interval which seriously affects the performance of my application (involves animation etc).

I use the exact same code for other browsers and do not have this problem there.

Answer 1

Change the identifier to something less generic like "textAreaAdv", IE sometimes get confused with this word.