Dug, >As you may have guessed, I'm not a developer, I'm an IA. The >developers are telling me this isn't possible and I figured if it >were, the folk on this list would be able to say. So if I understand >correctly, by the sound of it, this should be possible:-) > >You all had concerns about usability and make some very good points. >What I am trying to do is make the counter go away altogether. >Visually, the characters at the end of the textarea input are very >light grey and are almost invisible. The plan is to do this for a few >few months then remove it altogether. > >Here's a gif of the interface in rough form (brackets not to be >orange, that was the design guy adding bells and whistles as usual) > >http://www.donkeyontheedge.com/dev/i/OM2_2_writeSMS-story.gif
For the amount of work it would take to try to get it work like you have it in the GIF (especially considering this is a temporary idea) I'd move the character count below the text box in the grey border to the right. You could whip that code out in 2 minutes. Trying to place a floating DIV where the caret is currently positioned will be extremely difficult--and at best just a guess. I don't ever recall seeing any method that will give you an X/Y coordinator for the caret in an input box. You can detect where in the input stream the cursor is (as in 300th character position,) but I don't remember ever seeing anything that will give you a pixel coordinate. -Dan
