Most developers at some point needs to construct a WYSIWYG [What You See Is What You Get] textarea for customers that aren't familiar with HTML.

Internet Explorer provides such an editor just by adding the shorthand attribute contenteditable to a div tag but this is considered an ugly approach which is for internet-explorer only, and non-standard, and often people are forced to use "forumcode" or to give up.

A long time ago I though it must be possible to write a javascript WYSIWYG editor but it was never more than an idea.

It seems someone has realized that idea, and made /very/ easy embeddable editor. There are a few out there, but the ones I know of are:

FCKeditor

[www.fckeditor.com] – - Very complete WYSIWYG editor with support for forms which is sometimes needed for a CMS.

tinyMCE

[tinymce.moxiecode.com] – As the name states – a tiny editor, very compact and a bit faster to load than FCKeditor