I'm pretty sure that most of us have run into a situation where we've had to limit the size of a text box on a form. For instance, you may allow users to create a profile on your site with a description field and you only want it to be 1000 characters long. Limiting the size of the textbox is fairly simple (just set the MaxLength value). However setting that alone really doesn't help the user. Since the average person never really reads anything, he may skip the portion about the limited size, hit the max length, and then have no idea what is going on.

The easiest way to help a user know that an area has a character limit is to add a counter on the page.  Well I guess you could have the page yell at them the current values, but that might not go over so well... Plus you'd still have to give text clues to meet the whole 508/WAI accessibility standards... Anyway, since I don't like to rewrite code, nor having to write javascript code all the time, I wrote my own extender to take care of this for me:

CharacterCounterExtender.zip (1.69 kb)

This one is rather simple. The TargetControlID is the text box, UpdateControlID is the label/span/div/etc. that you want to show the number of characters, and there is an optional value that you can set (MaxCharacters). If MaxCharacters is set to anything other than 0, the counter shows the number of characters left and if it is set to 0 (or not set), then the counter simply counts the number of characters within the box. That's all there is to this one.

Also, why is Google coming out with their own browser called Chrome? I mean on one hand, it kind of explains the lack of enthusiasm they've had toward FireFox lately. Plus the whole push toward the "cloud"/SaaS style apps, not to mention Android, etc. Really just makes them seem like they're trying to replace Microsoft as the "OS of the future". I worry it's spreading them a bit thin though. Maybe not as they've got some smart people, but thus far with the exception of Gmail, Google maps, and of course their search ability, most of what they've come out with has been pretty mediocre and/or in constant beta (I'm not including YouTube, since they bought them well after YouTube was popular)...

Anyway, as far as Chrome is concerned I've tried it out and I have to say, I don't like the default settings... Feels like a weird mix of Opera and Safari.  Although even with changing the settings, I'm not sure I like it. I'm not a big fan thus far, but I don't think I'm the target market for Chrome.  My mother would probably love it though, and I'm going to have my wife test it to get her opinions.  I will say Chrome is fast, renders pages well, and some of the homepage features are nice (even if I'll almost never use them).  And if they open it up for people to make addons like FireFox, I could see it working out pretty well as a browser. That being said though, I just don't see it catching on. IE will still dominate the browser share. All I see it doing is taking people away from Safari, Opera, FireFox, etc... Not to mention the fact that it means I've got another browser to test my code in...

Well, now that I've angered Google (I'm sure my page ranking will drop like a stone), I'll just say happy coding.