I believe what you are referring to is the new contentEditable attribute. This is not a textarea, but rather an element attribute. This is good for allowing changes to content.
Notice that your browser likely doesn't give you the toolbar with bold, italics, etc. Yet chrome will let you select text and use CTR-B, CTR-I, etc. Things are still being ironed out with this.
Basically, it's a work in progress and your best bet for browser compatability is using a wysiwyg editer like tinymce et al.