TINY TABLE TIDBITS Written by FLO TRICKS WITH TEXTAREA BOXES 2 Last month, we learned how to border textarea boxes and color their text and backgrounds, for MSN TV and PCs. This month we'll learn some other tricks to make our textarea boxes more interesting. This is for MSN TV only. ATTRIBUTES: Any or all of the following attributes can be added to the basic textarea tag. autoactivate - an attribute that automatically highlights all the text. bgcolor - sets the color of the textarea backgound if you want it to be different from the default white or light gray. See nobackground below borderimage="null" (or "0") - this removes the default textarea border. cols - columns, one way of setting the width of the textarea box. Width can also be set in pixels or percents. cursor - sets the cursor color with either hex codes or colornames. growable - allows the textarea to expand down as you type. nobackground - this attribute over-rides the textarea default bgcolor of white or very light gray and allows the bgcolor of the page or table to show. See bgcolor above. nohighlight - removes the yellow highlight that MSN TV puts around the outside of the box.. rows - set the number of horizontal lines of text that will appear in the box. Use the growable attribute instead of this, if you wish all of the text to show. Use growable with rows if you do not want all the text to show at first, but you want it to expand down later. text - use this attribute to change the color of the text from the default black. GRADIENT BACKGROUNDS: Content: I used a borderless table with a gradient background. Instead of a table, the background color of the whole page could be gradient. Either way, the page's color will smoothly color the background of the textarea box. I also added two line breaks, using the Return key, after the text. CODES IMAGE BACKGROUND: I'll bet most people don't know that we can also put an image as a table background, then add a textarea box and the image will show as the background of the textarea box too. For both of these tables, the form tag <form> preceeds the table tag instead of being just before the textarea tag. The attribute growable enables the text to continue beyond the confines of the 10 rows specified in the textarea tag. Click your Return key a few times to see how to make this textarea grow. CODES ROM BUTTON BACKGROUNDS: MSN TV has a number of different button styles built into the browser. We can call them up, using a special code. Certain ones make unusual but good backgrounds for textareas. Remember, though, that these buttons are specific for MSN TV. Computer users probably will not see them. This textarea box has no table around it. This button is called a greenLED.bif. There's also a redLED.bif, plus many other types of buttons. See below for a link to a list of all the ROM buttons and the codes to use them. CODES FOR THIS TEXTAREA BOX CODES FOR ROM BUTTONS Now you can make your textarea boxes more interesting for your viewers. Save these codes, plus the ones from last month, and keep them in a file where you'll always have access to them. Back to the Tribune Counted 1312