[whatwg] Why there is no wrap="off", intentional or forgotten?

[Lachlan Hunt]

On 2010-06-02 13:05, Ashley Sheridan wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 12:51 +0200, Oldřich Vetešník wrote:
>> I'm missing the wrap="off" value for textarea wrap attribute; is there any
>> particular reason why this is not part of HTML5?
>> Currently the only values mentioned are "soft" and "hard":
>>
>> http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/the-button-element.html#attr-textarea-wrap

The explanation is here.

http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-August/022022.html

In theory, you can achieve the same effect by using CSS.

textarea { white-space: nowrap; }

This works fine in Opera, WebKit and IE.  Doesn't work in Gecko though.

> That does seem odd. I would have thought the default value would be
> 'off' or 'no' as I've never seen a browser yet wrap text in a textarea
> unless a specific wrapping method was specified either via an attribute
> or CSS.

Netscape 4 was the last browser I'm aware of that defaulted to that 
wrap=off behaviour.  I believe every other mainstream browser I'm aware 
of since then wraps by default.

-- 
Lachlan Hunt - Opera Software
http://lachy.id.au/
http://www.opera.com/