There’s some different format of text formatting on the web. for example used (and most adopted) wikipedia format. Reason I describe this idea is user shouldn’t be bothered to learn anyone (and currently it’s possible user was forced to learn many of text formatting language) and web developers shouldn’t been forced to write on side previewer.
Solution is quite simple:
- Add support for rtf (for Windows) and odt (most desktop GNU/Linux distro have installed LibreOffice)
- Support will allow to load document from disk or open new instance of WordPad or Writer
- Web designer could add attribute to textarea tag, telling which formatting language is supported.
- If web page delivers info about supported format, button to load or open text processing tool will appear
- After document was loaded by a web browser, Firefox will translate document to formatting language and insert output into textarea element