Excellent; hopefully everyone’s satisfied with this solution. Thought I’d suggested the idea when it came to mind after reading John’s objection but apparently that unfinished post got stuck in a limbo clipboard file. Thanks for just going ahead and doing it. It’s slicker than I anticipated by leaving the checkbox disabled while typing (undistracted) and only enabling it if there’s a reason (e.g. previewing and tweaking markup before posting).

So, you’ve succeeded in making this my favorite comment previewing for any blog I’ve posted on (Hawk Wings in second place, for now). It’s what I’d like to see bundled with a future WP release. From a usability perspective, what else could be as simple, effective, and non-intrusive?

(Discovered via Firefox’s Web Design Toolbar, and EditCSS Bookmarklet).

The only problem now is I can’t get Safari to display the label “Enable live preview” next to the checkbox. It seems because the checkbox is part of the overall “comments form,” Safari is padding out the size of the checkbox to match the “Name, Mail, Website” text boxes above. Anybody know how I can fix this? I’ve tried a bunch of stuff including setting a “label” value and “size” value on the checkbox element. No such luck.

It would seem I need to coerce Safari into making the checkbox element “narrower.” Something nasty like setting the right margin to -14.2em sort of does the trick. (Ideally, I’d like to be able to stick my text in that space and have Safari treat text-click the same as a button click, but I can’t figure that out either).

It’s pretty simple to implement a Disable checkflag. In fact, I thought it came with one. You just need to add the HTML Element in the template, and then modify the Javascript that tells it when to update, so it tests against that checkflag before updating.

Some browsers slow to a crawl with these type of systems, so a disable checkbox is essential.

I wrote a pure JavaScript version, if you are interested.

The problem with the Web is that there usually is no “beta phase” (Unless you’re Google, then it’s always Beta!). Whereas with my software I would probably think long and hard before adding a frivolous feature, it seems so easy on the web to just “let ‘er rip.”

So, I guess other people should chime in if they feel strongly. One thing I’ve noticed is that the preview text has now scrolled off the bottom of my screen, so it’s no longer distracting me.

Another thing that occurred to me as I tossed and turned in the night was that offering a preview mode like this might encourage an unwarranted amount of HTML use in comments. I’m not particularly looking for that. I suppose this little box I’m typing in is enough of a preview for most purposes. It’s not like I can’t fix somebody’s messed up link or whatever if they should happen to make one.

The other thing is that it’s just one more dependency on WordPress. As much as I have been raving about it lately, I do sort of like the free-agent status that a minimalist blog affords me.

Maybe a good compromise would be to hack the plugin so it at least requires a checkbox to “turn on” the preview.

And to double-check whether I have left anything out of the comment that I wanted to say.

Especially I like the opportunity it gives me to catch any typos before my comment disappears into WordPress and I can’t edit it anymore.

Man, is that annoying!