Back towards the beginnging of July, Jon Udell wrote a piece on the dominance, nowadays, of typing into a text field on the web. He discussed the reasons why TEXTAREA is not optimal, and put forth some potential successors to the web typing mantle.

Yesterday I was reminded how much we really do need something better. A friend of mine was typing something up on Yahoo! Mail for over an hour, and by just accidentally hitting the wrong button, entire pages worth of work was gone. What about undo, I said—but alas, Internet Explorer 6 on Windows does not support Undo or Redo in TEXTAREA (or any other kind of text field). I decided to investigate what happens on the Mac…

Click here to see what happens in Safari or Firefox (sorry for the crappy quality of the video).

I have yet to check to make sure that this works on Firefox on Windows as well, though I think that’s a safe assumption.

Update: I checked, and it does indeed work fine on Firefox running on Windows.