Possible to parse html text inside a textarea?

Hi, I have a slight problem with an area of a CMS where I've just implemented a text editor (whizzywig) in some of my forms. The problem is that I provide my client with the option to edit any information which they are uploading to their site and if they wish to edit some existing content, then i retrieve the content from a database and pre-populate a textarea where they can then make amendments. However, now that I've added a text editor which generates html tags, when someone goes to edit content the textarea is prepopulated with the content and also the html tags - which is something i'd like to avoid. Is there any way to convert the html tags being displayed?

Any help would be great as i'm baffled with this one!

i am not sure how it is done but i would recommend using tinymce this is what i use in my CMS.

There's no way to do this strictly with HTML and CSS. You'd need to dynamically alter the style of the stuff in the textbox with javascript. mic2100's suggestion of TinyMCE is a prebuilt solution and one that I would probably use, too.