title: Elegant way to count the number of characters in a textarea/input box
body: <p>So I want to tell a user how many characters they have typed, dynamically. I'm seeing several examples online of using "Onchange" or "OnKeyUp", but they're both old examples and they seem sorta kludgy.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a better way? Perhaps some method of binding/assigning (may not be using this term correctly) the value to a variable, and then checking every time a change has been made?</p>