Mac Forum / Programming / Perl / May 2005

How does textarea screw up your page layout?

If you're spec'ing for text entry that large, I believe a textarea is
better suited.  If I remember correctly, a text field is a
    display: inline;
whereas, the textarea is
    display: block;

So, you have a style like this:

textarea {
    display: inline;
}

And you're done..

Hell, you can even have multiple rows with the textarea and using CSS
determine the position relative to the text line.

I think its a "vertical-align" property that can be set to :
baseline, sub, super, top, text-top, middle, bottom, text-bottom.

And to the best of my knowledge, ALL of those CSS properties are
supported and work in all major and minor browsers..  you can find out
more on interoperability at

http://www.quirksmode.org

I doubt that there's a 1k limit in the spec, but Apple (they've got a
bit of design experience) might have said "if they're typing more than
one thousand characters, perhaps the designer should use a more usable
textarea field" or its something the KHTML  people put in for the very
same reason and apple never modified when it converted it to WebCore.

Either way, 1000 characters is WAY too much text for a text input field
and unless you're employing some fancy and extravagant bleeding edge CSS
/ JS, you're simple ignoring the usability of your form.

Design.