Hello,
I've encountered a problem with textarea-Elements in content.
A user asked me how to create a form with a textarea Element. It is quite easy
to enter the HTML code, for example in TinyMCE, directly as HTML:
<h1>New XHTML document</h1>
<p>
Here comes the text of your new document...
</p>
<p>
<textarea cols="60" name="thema" rows="3"></textarea>
</p>
<p>
<input name="zeit" type="text" />
</p>
However, when you save it, it looks very strange: the second input field is
missing, and the HTML _code_ following the textarea is shown in the textarea
input field.
The problem here is that an empty textarea element is emitted as
<textarea .../>
and not as
<textarea ...></textarea>
The former is certainly valid XHTML, but the browser doesn't treat it as such,
but as an error: it behaves as if the "/" character was missing, thus efectively
treating the rest of the document as part of the textarea. (Tested with Firefox3
and IE7).
A bit of research led to this page:
http://hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml
which claims that XHTML doesn't work together with content-type text/html in
these browsers.
(See also: http://www.lshift.net/blog/2006/04/03/xhtml-considered-harmful)
One could argue that the "correct" Content-Type "application/xhtml+xml" is set
in the META http-equiv="content-type" tag of the HTML head, but that doesn't
matter since the http response header sets text/html; just as the charset in
that META tag doesn't matter if the http header specifies another one.
OK, so I changed my publication's sitemap to finally call map:serialize with
type="html" instead of type="xhtml". This seems to get around the problem.
I hope I have explained myself correctly; I'm very grateful for any other
insight or proposal.
(The obvious workaround, not using textarea, is probably not something I can
easily explain to my user :-))
Finally, another problem that looks much easier to solve:
Try to edit the page with the textarea element with TinyMCE, and the editor area
is messed up: everything after the textarea is placed below the editable area.
Sometimes even the Save and Cancel buttons stop working.
What happens is this: tinymce uses a textarea for the editor instance, and the
inner textarea Element is copied as is. The browser takes the first
"</textarea>" (the one terminating the inner one) as end tag for the first
"<textarea>" (the outer one).
I'm not sure how this should be handled: by escaping the inner textarea, ie.
sending "</textarea>"?
Rainer Schöpf
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