javascript - How do Rich Text Editors in HTML documents achieve their rich text formatting?

Question

Could you please explain how the text in the textarea gets styled in rich-text editors? I've tried to style text in the form but it doesn't change.

Is it JS that recognizes characters typed by the user? How's that done?

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Edit:

After a bit of research (Google rules!), I've found some excellent information. For others who might be interested, these links were very helpful to me:

• http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/gr/column11/
• http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/gr/column12/

Answer 1

I think the answer is that what you're looking at is typically NOT an actual <textarea>. It's a <div> or <span> made to look like a text area. A regular HTML textarea doesn't have individual formatting of the text.

"Rich-Text editors" will have controls that modify the contents of the span/div with regular html markup (<strong>, <em>, etc.) to emulate a full-blown rich text editor