title: <textarea> character limit
body: <p>What is a <em>cross-browser</em> way to set the maximum number of characters in a textarea, using plain Javascript?  <a href="http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_textarea_maxlength.asp" rel="nofollow"><code>maxlength</code></a> does not work for textareas on Opera and IE9 and below (though it works on all major browsers for inputs).  </p>
  
  <p>Once the character limit is reached, the textarea should not allow more characters to be entered.  Text pasted either with Ctrl+V or the right-click context menu should be cut off at the character limit.  This means a solution that uses only <code>onkey___</code> events is not sufficient.</p>