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Is there a way to reduce the size of the text box and button?
I've tripped over this one a bit. The appearance and usability of form pages can be critical - it's often where the rubber meets the road for an online business. And up until Netscape 4.5 or so, there are lots of oddities.
Here's the simpler part (the button): You can create your own graphic to use as a submit button -- any size or appearance you want. Instead of using type=submit, just use this code in the form.
<input type=image src="yourimage.gif" name="signup">
Now the more complicated part (the textarea): One way I found is to use CSS to keep the font both monospace and a given size. This seems to tame the browser differences pretty well. In the css file (or between <style> tags in the head section) you create a class:
.mono {font-family:Courier, monospace;font-size:10pt;}
Then your form can tap into this class:
<form class="mono">
<font class="mono"><textarea cols="25" rows="3"></textarea></font>
</form>
Note: I've found that I need to put the class in both the form tag and the font tag to get good cross-browser, cross-version results.
Sometimes, especially when I don't want that monospace look in the textarea, I use a browser sniffer JavaScript code so I can feed Netscape a different page altogether.
<input type="text" name="Input" size="12" style="font-size: 10pt">
<textarea name="Body" cols="58" rows="10" wrap="physical" style="font-size: 10pt">
I use the same basic idea as tedster suggested, except that I use a <span> tag instead of a <font> tag. I.e.:
<form class="mono">
<span class="mono"><textarea cols="25" rows="3"></textarea></span>
</form>
