[whatwg] textarea semantics for wrap, readonly, and disabled

Hi all,

In testing various combinations of attributes on textareas, I've found
a couple of inconsistencies and some vagueness in the spec.

1) The wrap="hard" attribute appears to be defined such that you get
hard line breaks at the specified character width of the element, but
the semantics of the wrap="soft" attribute are not defined. And, in
admittedly limited testing, WebKit, Gecko, and Trident all treated
soft as if it was hard. Opera 10 seems to treat hard as if it was
soft, meaning that it does not force linebreaks at the specified
character width, and content overflowed (without a scroll bar being
displayed). What are the semantics of wrap="soft" supposed to be?

2) wrap="off" does not appear to be a legitimate value, despite being
implemented in all the major browsers. Is this an oversight, or an
intentional omission?

2) If the textarea is specified as "disabled", but the text overflows
the alloted size, should the scrollbars be enabled so you can scroll
to see the content, or should the scrollbars be disabled (preventing
the user from seeing the content)?

Thanks!

-- Dirk

Received on Wednesday, 2 September 2009 13:26:53 UTC