[thelist] JAVASCRIPT: realtime update of input fields in a form

Chris W. Parker cparker at swatgear.com
Mon Jul 1 17:56:01 CDT 2002


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tom Dell'Aringa [mailto:pixelmech at yahoo.com]
> Sent: Monday, July 01, 2002 3:44 PM
>
> first of all the var i = 5 cracked me up. (You DO realize that var
> affects scope right? ;)...

no i did not. but it's syntactically correct right? good enough for me
then.

> Anyway, as far as your idea - I think you will find that unless you
> have a very small entry in your CMS, that you might not like the
> results of what your cool toy becomes. Besides whatever else you have
> on the page, you have to have your entry form area with the
> modification buttons, then you have to have a duplicate form area
> below (without the mods) to have your "live" preview.
>
> This is a lot of real estate to grab up on a page, and I think you'll
> find the user scrolling up / down or left/right to see his "live
> preview".
>
> I have a CMS with HTML formatting, and to add your feature would make
> my page extremely long (its for entering short one page articles).

i am open to not doing this. i just thought it would be "cool" you know?
what about splitting the page vertically? the left side could be the
input box with formatting buttons on the top or bottom of the input box.
and the "preview" on the right side taking advantage of wordwrapping.
assuming the CMS is designed for no less than 8x6 i think the preview
would fit. the vertical split could even be like 40%|60%, giving the
preview more space and the input less.

i mean, it's not like i'm stuck on this idea and i just _HAVE_ to do it
because it's so 1337. i honestly want to do what's easiest for the user
so if this turns out to be not-so-easy for the user then it can go to
hell. ;)

> Thats my .02 on the idea, now on to the implementation - you can do
> it, it will be a pain - in fact doing it in "real" time will be a
> "real" pain when it comes to bold, italics, etc. You are going to be
> having to constantly check your "entry" content vs your "live
> preview" content. You'll probably need to use the onChange event
> handler for this.
>
> The trick is going to parsing and matching everything up. I'm
> thinking you might end up using regular expressions.
>
> So to sum up:
>
> 1 - I have given you no real good information on the actual code
> other than you have to probably use onChange

thanks. that's about what i figured on my own.


chris.



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