When you post something on a forum, on a guestbook, on anything on the web which supports some kind of formatting of your code it works with some sort of BB-Code.
BB-Code is just like HTML formatting, with ‘[]’s instead of ‘<>‘s, and a lot less features. It is hard to type and doesn’t look neat.
But who cares? Everyone uses BB-Code, almost everyone knows BB-Code, and most people don’t find it hard to type for people are just too used to it!
There are alternatives to BB-Code, like Textile and Markdown, which use a more convenient syntax.
Personally I don’t like using them for I ain’t used to the syntax.
However.. why would we want to write formating anyway? Why not just use wysiwyg, and I do not mean a java applet but rather a standard for browsers; a new tag: “<input type="formatted" name="example" />“, which would act for the server as a normal input field returning the formatted text in Html.
The problem is that it would be very hard to get every browser to support such a new tag. Most browsers I guess would be very willing to comply. But browsers like for instance Internet Explorer wouldn’t. They don’t even comply with the simplest of CSS at the moment which gives website developers a headache.
You’re familiar with HTMLArea? http://www.htmlarea.com
Yes, but using Javascript and manipulating the Html document is just a big workaround. Javascript is being overrated.