HTML Textareas are just no fun, and they don't even work properly (maxlength anyone?). Here's a quick fix replacement for the textarea that adds the maxlength functionality, and displays a nice doomsday character countdown for alphabet-heavy users.

TextareaPlus.js will run for all textareas on your page as long as they are surrounded by an element with the TextareaPlus CSS class applied. In order to get this script working without any other javascript code other than the library, I've hi-jacked the title attribute of the surrounding element to store maxlength.

Installation Notes

Run the sample HTML file in the download, then view the source to see how it works. The download package includes two zip files - style.css which you can ignore (just contains site styles) and textareaplus.css which you must include. You should of course make adjustments to this based on your brand / requirements, however positioning and layout styles should be preserved to keep the script working as expected.

TextareaPlus.js requires the excellent jQuery library to work (version included).

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Do you like it? Need more?
If you like TextareaPlus.js, or have any ideas for improvement, let me know in the comments below: