textarea

Level: 2

When you need to let users enter more than one line of text, you should use the textarea element, e.g.

<textarea name="address" ROWS=64 COLS=6>

HaL Computer Systems
1315 Dell Avenue
Campbell, California 95008
</textarea>

The text up to the end tag is used to initialize the field's value. This end tag is always required even if the field is initially blank.

In a typical rendering, the rows and cols attributes determine the visible dimension of the field in characters. The field is rendered in a fixed-width font. Browsers should allow text to grow beyond these limits by scrolling as needed.


NOTE:
In the initial design for forms, multi-line text fields were supported by the input element with type=text. Unfortunately, this causes problems for fields with long text values as SGML limits the length of attribute literals. The HTML 2.0 DTD allows for up to 1024 characters (the SGML default is only 240 characters!).


Preceding Section:
select
Following Section: Special Characters
Parent Section: Forms and Input fields
Contents of HyperText Markup Language