Rendering HTML inside textarea

Question

I need to be able to render some HTML tags inside a textarea (namely <strong>, <i>, <u>, <a>) but textareas only interpret their content as text. Is there an easy way of doing it without relying on external libraries/plugins (I'm using jQuery)? If not, do you know of any jQuery plugin I could use to do this?

Answer 1

An addendum to this. You can use character entities (such as changing <div> to <div>) and it will render in the textarea. But when it is saved, the value of the textarea is the text as rendered. So you don't need to de-encode. I just tested this across browsers (ie back to 11).