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In one of his (very informative) video lectures, Douglas Crockford remarks that writing JavaScript for the web is 'programming in a hostile environment'. I had done my fair share of weird workarounds, and even occasonally gave up an on idea entirely because browsers just wouldn't support it, but before this project I never really realized just how powerless a programmer can be in the face of buggy, incompatible, and poorly designed platforms. The plan was not ridiculously ambitious. I wanted to 'enhance' a textarea to the point where writing code in it is pleasant. This meant automatic indentation and, if possible at all, syntax highlighting. In this document I describe the story of implementing this, for your education and amusement. A demonstration of the resulting program, along with the source code, can be found at my website.