[whatwg] Textarea wrap=off

Tab Atkins Jr. jackalmage at gmail.com
Fri Aug 7 08:05:05 PDT 2009


Proposal
========
Add the "off" state to the @wrap attribute for textareas.

Explanation
===========
The "off" state prevents a textarea from wrapping text at all while
displaying.  Instead, text that is too long for the textarea trigger a
horizontal scrollbar, but stays on one line.  The only way for text to
drop to a new line is with an actual carriage return.

The value of a textarea with wrap=off is the same as wrap=soft.

Reasoning
=========
Every UA I've tested (FF3.5, IE7, Opera10B2, Safari4, Chrome2) already
supports it.  They offer slightly different displays of a wrap=off
textarea, but the basic functionality as described above is identical
and seemingly interoperable.  Adding this to the spec shouldn't
require any additional work from the UAs, it would merely be
recognizing and enshrining a facility that is already common to all of
them.



More information about the whatwg mailing list