Textarea form width and height

[Brett_Tabke]

Any standards on what you should use for width and height of textarea's? I can't find so much as a recommendation anywhere.

[tedster]

I've never seen anything like that either Brett. I think that both columns and rows would vary considerably in specific contexts.

Your question brings up a related area for me. I've read that the HTML 4.0 specs don't include WRAP for textarea.

Netscape and MSIE both list WRAP = HARD ¦ SOFT ¦ OFF in their guides. (Hard sends the visible linebreaks to the server and soft does not). These seem very useful to me, and I wouldn't like to see them vanish.

Does anyone know why HTML 4 doesn't include the WRAP attribute?

[sugarkane]

AFAIK it's never been in the recommendations - I think it's a Netscape extension?

[grnidone]

Joe Burns says make a text area column no wider than 30. Cuz that's the way he likes it.

But Ted's right. I haven't seen a "recommended" size. And I have always used "wrap=virtual"...

-G

[tedster]

Looks like this area is a side skirmish in the browser wars, started back when Netscape was dominant.

I read on idocs.com [idocs.com] that Virtual and Physical were Netscape's proposed values for HTML 3.0. Soft and hard, respectively were the MSIE proposal.

Then I read on Webreference.com [webreference.com] that Netscape now supports only hard¦soft and MSIE supports physical¦virtual. That's a weird reversal!

I've also read that recent browsers only support the hard¦soft values. The W3C recommendation is nothing.

Can't say I've tested any of this, though, and I just tried to research it and only ended up more confused.

Does anyone have a definitive word?