TEXTAREA

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>
Hewlett Packard Laboratories
1501 Page Mill Road
Palo Alto, California 94304-1126
</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.

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 are recommended to allow text to grow beyond these limits by scrolling as needed.

Explanatory Note: TEXTAREA and INPUT/TEXT

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+ DTD allows for up to 1024 characters (the SGML default is only 240 characters!).