Re: textarea rows and cols attributes (was: Re: Error Message Feedback)

Ritchey Mulhollem wrote:
> Making rows and cols a required attribute of a textarea is pointless 
> because the style sheet over rides it!!

It's not pointless, it allows for better graceful degredation where 
stylesheets are not enabled/supported.

> Rows and Cols should be depricated because the use of CSS makes them
> an obsolete hold over.

The validator team aren't the right people to address this issue.  The 
HTML WG would be a better choice but you might be interested to know 
that the Web Forms 2.0 draft [1] (part of the proposed "HTML 5" 
extensions) does make rows and cols optional.

> Why force me to write <textarea class="textarea" rows="0" cols="0">

What about users without stylesheets enabled or unsupported?  You'll 
give them a text area they can't use!  It would be better to omit them 
and accept the validation error, than to force such a ridiculously small 
size.  You should, however, set values large enough to give a reasonably 
sized text area for such users.

[1] http://whatwg.org/specs/web-forms/current-work/#extensions1

-- 
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/

Received on Wednesday, 10 August 2005 04:50:46 UTC