@Old Pendant
In order
Nah I have been given specific requirements to change both the fontcolor and the backcolor.
Yes i know it isnt very hard to do. But its totally monotonous and time-consuming. Plus i have to change it in almost 500 pages with multiple instances on each page.
Our code doesnt worry about the extra elements being submitted so Thank God for that or else that wouldv'e been taxing.
Regarding your soluion, I was thinking along the same lines. However instead of doing it in javascript I used a different approach. We have our own customized textboxes and i added a similar code in the library for rendering that control. This should take care of all the permanently 'readonly' controls. However there are a huge no of textboxes which are disabled onload onclientside. For those controls i may be able to use your code or i could start changing .disabled to .readOnly. I am not sure yet which approach to follow.
Another issue here is the fields that get disabled by user interaction(checking a checkbox and stuff like that). I HAVE to change .disabled to .readonly for those fields in our code. There doesn't seem to be any other way for this.
I am facing another issue here. The readonly fields take focus. I do not want that. So i thought i could use onfocus = this.blur(); THis doesnt seem to work. Is there any other way past that. I am afraid that your anwer would be to explicitly specify the next control where the focus should go. If that's the case i might as well give up right now.