Can't update textarea with javascript after writing to it manually

Question

I'm writing an online application where I save some texts to the database.
There are like 5 "textarea"-s and 5 "input type=text"-s.
I'm also implementing a search to easily find and edit the DB entries. A new select window is displayed(using prototype and ajax), and when clicking on any of its entries the below form gets populated (it's the same form that was used to add new results). Now here's where the problem arises....
If i add a new form or edit any existing one ALL TEXTAREA fields that were modified, get locked or something like it (only textareas, the inputs still work) ... They won't obey Javascripts .update anymore, so they don't change when i select the next entry .... OR AT LEAST THEY WONT IN FireFox (3.5.something). It works fine in IE, but since i'm a FF user and i wan't it work there as well i'm wondering if someone has come across any similar problems and solved it with ease.
The problem seem to go away when i call form.reset(), but that messes up some code generated select/option fields, besides i wan't the data to remain.

To me it looks like FF decided that the text I entered is more important than text javascript is trying to enter, so it overrides it... and i can't figure out why. At this point I'm blaming .update(), but i'm not sure how to do it otherwise.
The INPUT fields seem to have problems with .update (or it just didn't work for me), so i had to rewrite them to .value= (have tried .value with textareas as well, hoping that would fix anything, sadly with no avail).

So, has anyone any clues why this is happening and how to fix it, without having to reset the form on every step?

Answer 1

I had this same problem. When HTML is parsing to DOM object, content of textarea is innetHTML of <textarea>

<textarea cols="10" rows="10">Content of textarea</textarea> 

Values document.getElementByTagName('textarea').innerHTML and document.getElementByTagName('textarea').value returns this same value Content of textarea

But after loading DOM object, changing innerHTML value doesn't change content of textarea box. A solution to change it is modifying value field.

document.getElementByTagName('textarea').value="New content of textarea"; 

or in jquery

$("textarea").val("New content of textarea"); 

Answer 2

.value and .innerHTML seemed to fix the problem