Why is textarea filled with mysterious white spaces?

Open (and close!) your PHP tags right after, and before, your textarea tags:

<textarea style="width:350px; height:80px;" cols="42" rows="5" name="sitelink"><?php
  if($siteLink_val) echo $siteLink_val;
?></textarea>

Well, everything between <textarea> and </textarea> is used as the default value for your textarea box. There is some whitespace in your example there. Try to eliminate all of that.

Look closely at your code. In it, there are already three line breaks, and a ton of white space before </textarea>. Remove those first so that there are no line breaks in between the tags any more. It might already do the trick.

In short: <textarea> should be closed immediately on the same line where it started.

---

General Practice: this will add-up line-breaks and spaces used for indentation in the code.

<textarea id="sitelink" name="sitelink">
</textarea>

Correct Practice

<textarea id="sitelink" name="sitelink"></textarea>