Why isn't textarea an input[type="textarea"]?

Maybe this is going a bit too far back but…

Also, I’d like to suggest that multiline text fields have a different type (e.g. “textarea") than single-line fields ("text"), as they really are different types of things, and imply different issues (semantics) for client-side handling.

– Marc Andreessen, 11 October 1993


So that its value can easily contain quotes and <> characters and respect whitespace and newlines.

The following HTML code successfully pass the w3c validator and displays <,> and & without the need to encode them. It also respects the white spaces.

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8" />
    <title>Yes I can</title>
</head>
<body>
    <textarea name="test">
        I can put < and > and & signs in 
        my textarea without any problems.
    </textarea>
</body>
</html>

A textarea can contain multiple lines of text, so one wouldn't be able to pre-populate it using a value attribute.

Similarly, the select element needs to be its own element to accommodate option sub-elements.

Tags:

Html

Types

Textarea

Input

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