Why isn t textarea an input type textarea

Question

Why is there an element  lt textarea gt  instead of  lt input type  textarea  gt

User · Answer

I realize this is an older post  but thought this might be helpful to anyone wondering the same question   While the previous answers are no doubt valid  there is a more simple reason for the distinction between textarea and input    As mentioned previously  HTML is used to describe and give as much semantic structure to web content as possible  including input forms  A textarea may be used for input  however a textarea can also be marked as read only via the readonly attribute  The existence of such an attribute would not make any sense for an input type  and thus the distinction

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

So that its value can easily contain quotes and  lt   characters and respect whitespace and newlines   The following HTML code successfully pass the w3c validator and displays  lt    and  amp  without the need to encode them  It also respects the white spaces    lt  doctype html gt   lt html lang  en  gt   lt head gt       lt meta charset  UTF-8    gt       lt title gt Yes I can lt  title gt   lt  head gt   lt body gt       lt textarea name  test  gt          I can put  lt  and  gt  and  amp  signs in          my textarea without any problems       lt  textarea gt   lt  body gt   lt  html gt

User · Answer

It was a limitation of the technology at the time it was created   My answer copied over from Programmers SE   From one of the original HTML drafts      NOTE  In the initial design for forms  multi-line text fields were   supported by the Input element with TYPE TEXT  Unfortunately  this   causes problems for fields with long text values  SGML s default    Reference Quantity Set  limits the length of attribute literals to   only 240 characters  The HTML 2 0 SGML declaration increases the limit   to 1024 characters

User · Answer

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

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

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