It could be argued that it is more than presentation. It indicates to the user about the quantity or usage of the textarea; the size of text fields is a usability topic. If you were told to write a "Summary of your proposal", and given 8 lines instead of 2 lines, you would probably write a completely different passage of text.
Perhaps, but that seems very obviously a presentational aspect to me. The number of rows and columns of a textarea in no way constrains the amount of text that can be entered, it only affect the appearance of the input area on the screen.
< input type="text" /> fields have the optional maxlength attribute to constrain the length of input, but the apparent size of the input field is wholly determined by CSS width. The W3C leaves it completely up to you if you style an input field with {width: 1px;} but maxlength="64000" and it surprises me that they make an exception with textarea.
Presumably, when they deprecated the width attribute for input but kept maxlength, they fervently wished they could do the same for textarea but couldn't, since textarea wasn't born with a maxlength and they probably didn't deem it wise to tack one on. I wouldn't be surprised if this detail generated considerable debate, although I can't find any reference to the decision-making process on their site.
Regards,
Paul
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