[whatwg] Text areas with pattern attributes?

Alex Vincent ajvincent at gmail.com
Wed Aug 19 08:28:03 PDT 2009


I'm drifting into writing code for the pattern attribute on text
fields again, and I wondered:  if text inputs can have pattern
attribute for regular expression matching, why not text area elements?

The HTML 5 spec says: "The textarea element represents a multiline
plain text edit control for the element's raw value.".  It might make
some sense to include support for pattern validation on text areas.

On the other hand, text areas could be a lot larger than standard text
inputs.  (There's no maxlength attribute for text areas in HTML 4.01,
but there is in HTML 5.)

I did a quick search on the mailing list, and I didn't see any
indication this issue had been raised before.

Alex

--
"The first step in confirming there is a bug in someone else's work is
confirming there are no bugs in your own."
-- Alexander J. Vincent, June 30, 2001


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