resizable text areas

By anders pearson 01 Apr 2005

i did this about a year ago but forgot to really mention it to anyone. now, there seems to be a renewed interest in all things javascript/dhtml, so maybe someone will find it useful. it’s basically just a little javascript hack that makes it so users can dynamically resize a textarea on a page. it works in every modern browser i’ve tried it in and degrades gracefully to a plain old textarea in any browser that doesn’t support it or has javascript disabled.

i’m trying to make a point of sharing more of these little tricks with the world.

the script uses a drag and drop implementation from elsewhere. i’m not crazy about it, but i wasn’t about to write my own. at some point though, i’d like to remove the little bit of javascript in the page that it requires to make it more in line with the idea of unobtrusive javascript. that will probably require modifying the drag + drop library though, or implementing the parts of it that i need on my own.

i’m also really interested in taking this technique and turning it into a greasemonkey script so i can resize the textareas on any page on the web.

Tags: programming dhtml javascript