Rob freeman wrote:

> I did remove the col and rows from the textarea
> and let css control the width and height of my comments box.

Remember the CSS Caveats: there are many reasons why your style sheet 
rules might not have the desired effects, see
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/css-caveats.html

> What do I have to do to get this page to validate?

To use valid markup. Validation as such is a formal issue and completely 
independent of CSS, hence off-topic in the css-discuss list.

It might be relevant to note, however, that the rows and cols attribute 
have no effect on rendering _if_ you set textarea dimensions in CSS 
_and_ the browser correctly applies that part of your style sheet. Thus, 
being valid in this issue has no "cost" in terms of styling with CSS. On 
the contrary, it may come to rescue when your style sheet is not 
applied.

On the other hand, the HTML attributes are the most _natural_ way of 
setting textarea dimensions, in terms of rows (number of lines) and 
columns (number of characters on a line), though the cols thing is not 
very reliable: it is theoretically obscure (what's "average width" of a 
character?) and inconsistently implemented. Yet, there is no CSS unit 
corresponding to the average width of a character, and setting the 
height as number of lines is more complicated in CSS (you need to pay 
attention to line-height, among other things).

So it's really best to _start_ with the rows and cols attributes and 
then (maybe) consider whether CSS dimensioning might make an improvement 
(when CSS is "on").

> http://www.coloursense.net/testfolder/contact.php

Unless you have a compelling reason to do otherwise, it's best to give a 
textarea more width (50 - 60 characters is generally considered as the 
optimal line length for reading, and why shouldn't the user be allowed 
to read this own text comfortably?). This generally means that it should 
appear below other fields, not side by side with them.

CSS even lets you set a textarea as wide as possible within the 
available width, using width: 100%, but it's debatable whether that's 
useful.


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

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