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!).