IE8 has a known bug (per connect.microsoft.com) where typing or pasting text into a TEXTAREA element will cause the textarea to scroll by itself. This is hugely annoying and shows up in many community sites, including Wikipedia. The repro is this:

  1. open the HTML below with IE8 (or use any long page on wikipedia which will exhibit the same problem until they fix it)
  2. size the browser full-screen
  3. paste a few pages of text into the TEXTAREA
  4. move the scrollbar to the middle position
  5. now type one character into the textarea

Expected: nothing happens Actual: scrolling happens on its own, and the insertion point ends up near the bottom of the textarea!

Below is repro HTML (can also see this live on the web here: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Text_box&action=edit) 

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" ><body>
 <div style="width: 80%">
   <textarea rows="20" cols="80" style="width:100%;" ></textarea>
 </div>
</body></html>

I know I can avoid this by forcing the website into IE7 compatibility mode, but what's the best other way to work around this bug while causing as few side-effects as possible?

css internet-explorer-8 textarea mediawiki
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