Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 10/25/06 05:44

Scripsit Poddys:

> I have a form that contains a TEXTAREA of 5 rows.

That's far too small for most purposes. You're telling users that you don't
care about their convenience and that you don't want any real comments -
especially not any detailed, well-written, useful comments. How much can you
say on five lines? (Quite a lot if you are a professional journalist, but
most people aren't.)

> The title of the
> text area is to the left of the input field.

Why? That's bad, because it consumes the valuable horizontal width for
nothing useful, as compared with putting the "title" (i.e., label) before
the textarea.

> Comments:            
> (TEXTAREA name="Comments" rows="5" cols="40"
> wrap="physical")(/TEXTAREA)

<blink><marquee><font color="red" size="7">If your newsreader interprets
HTML markup in Usenet messages, fix its settings <u>now</u> or get a better
newsreader!</font></marquee></blink>

(That's because the only reason for munging markup by replacing "<" and ">"
by "(" and ")" is the expectation that newsreaders do such foolish things.)

Make it
<label for="comm">Comments:</label><br>
<textarea id="comm" rows="20" cols="60" style="width:100%">
</textarea>

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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