Text areas are for larger areas of text, such as a comments entry area in a form. <textarea> is not specified as the attribute of an <input> tag, but is its own tag.

<textarea> is also an exception to most of the form-specific tags we have seen thus far in that it is a closed tag. If you ever see HTML spilling inside a <textarea> when you view a form in a browser, you know that you haven’t closed the <textarea> properly, filling the area with anything that comes immediately after the opening tag:

<label for="comment" accesskey="m">Your comments</label>
<textarea name="comment" id="comment" rows="5" cols="80">
	This is some default text
</textarea>

The size of a <textarea> is also defined differently from other elements, through rows and cols attributes (respectively, the number of lines and characters per line that can be displayed in the <textarea>).

Photograph by Speg of the Pigs, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license

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