Web-based forums/boards have had comment formatting buttons (quote, italic, bold, link, etc.) for years. I have no theories as to why this feature is not present on any major blogging platforms I know of. Even weirder, it’s really hard to find a plugin to implement what would seemingly be a much-requested feature. But went searching for one tonight and eventually found LMBBox.
Not listed in the major plugin repo’s. Doesn’t claim support for anything over WP 2.0, but I’ve got it working in WP 2.3. Required some mods to comments.php in my theme (probably one reason why it’s not a common plugin), but seems to be working nicely (Safari of course insists on showing its usual elegant but un-styled form buttons; not yet tested in IE).
Music: Vicki Anderson :: The Message From The Soul Sister
Safari is styling the buttons above, but not the Submit Comment button below.
By gum, you’re right – I just had to Shift-reload in Safari to get the old stylesheet out of the cache. Der.
Movable Type has had these for years, and have had some incremental improvements, but I remember being frustrated for a year or so when they would not show in Safari. Joomla lets you choose from a number of plug-in editors, shipping one that is quite sophisticated, even helping you compose in-line CSS.
For a while, Safari was incompatible with these systems – I think the javascript interpreter was missing a function. No wait, it was that you couldn’t get the selection inside of the
textareafrom within javascript. Basically, adding a tag just added it to the end of thetextarea.This was fixed in a Safari Nightly build ages ago, and rolled out with Safari 3.0 to the rest of the world.
Now, we also have resizeable
textareaelements by default. That, IMHO, is cool.@Jeb: Re MT having had these for years – you’re referring to the back-end, not for public comments, right? All the major blogging systems have had them on the back-end for years, but not for the public, for whatever reason. Unless there was an MT option to do this that I was never aware of.
@Matt: I love the resizable textareas in Safari. Wish FF had those, but unfortunately that’s not reason enough (for me) to outweigh the plugin culture of FF.