Javascript: form text to bold onclick

[DragonEye]

hi,

I am currently making a site for a Belgian company and they want to be able to edit the content of their site through some kind of administration panel. I have created such a secured panel using PHP but I am having some problems to make a user friendly system for them to alter the site.

I have a form that that is filled out with the current text when they open it. The idea is that they can alter the text AND the layout of that text and there is my problem.

I would like them to be able to select text in a textarea field and when they click on the BOLD button the selected text should be bold immediately.

In the beta version of the system I'm using some phpBB-like system that adds (b) and (/b) around the selection but I would consider it more user friendly if I could lose the tags and let the selected form text go bold.

I have tried doing this with
document.selection.createRange().text.style.fontWe ight="bold" but that did not work

any ideas?

grtz

DragonEye

[LazyJim]

textarea displays only plain-text as far as I know.
Best bet is to investigate making ordinary elements (like <div> and <p>) editable with browser-specific attributes like 'designmode' and 'contenteditable' (think I remembered them right :\ ).

[LazyJim]

also a text-range object is not an actual part of the document, so giving it a style will not help. text ranges are just text, although IE will let you set the HTML of a range so you could wrap it in <stong> tags.

In fact if your clients agreed they would only use your editing system with IE your task would become a lot easier.