How do I force the keyboard to stay open in Safari?

If anyone is still interested, here is the closest I could get to a solution.

If the iPhone or iPad wants a text field, give it one. Create it immediately before the area your keystrokes will populate, then do everything you can to hide it.

<input type="text" id="keyboardtrigger" style="position: relative; top: 100px; background-color: transparent; border: transparent; height:0px;" />

Now, every event where you want to make the keyboard visible, add the Javascript line

$("#keyboardtrigger").focus();

And the keyboard appears. Take the focus away from the text box and it dissapears.

Just a couple of notes:-

• You will get a very small blinking cursor - hopefully not too much of a problem
• The keyboard works, but cursor movements and mouse drags for selecting your text doesn't. That is a totally different problem. Like the keyboard, they really only work in a text field.