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sizing of textarea field (was: Re: lynx-dev Re: [-dev.12] experimenta


From: Leonid Pauzner
Subject: sizing of textarea field (was: Re: lynx-dev Re: [-dev.12] experimental text entry fields patch...
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1999 15:06:40 +0300 (MSK)

9-Jan-99 19:00 Kim DeVaughn wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 09, 1999, Bela Lubkin (address@hidden) said:
[...]
> Since you brought it up above, I was wondering about the end effect(s)
> of what typically happens if one sends back to the site more lines (or
> total text size) than was originally intended by the page's text-area
> "sizing" parameters.

The actual text between <textarea> </textarea> may be of arbitrary size,
as explicitely specified in HTML3.2 and HTML4.0, see quotation below.
Text-area sizing parameters limit only a user-visible "window"
for entering text (it is just a suggested presentation design),
the textarea input should be scrolled inside this "window"
as it done with GUI browsers but Lynx have a certain limitations here.


                      HTML 3.2 Reference Specification

                       W3C Recommendation 14-Jan-1997
[...]

  Form fields

   INPUT, SELECT and TEXTAREA are only allowed within FORM elements.
[...]

  TEXTAREA multi-line text fields

<!-- Multi-line text input field. -->

<!ELEMENT TEXTAREA - - (#PCDATA)*>
<!ATTLIST TEXTAREA
        name CDATA #REQUIRED
        rows NUMBER #REQUIRED
        cols NUMBER #REQUIRED
        >

   TEXTAREA elements require start and end tags. The content of the
   element is restricted to text and character entities. It is used to
   initialize the text that is shown when the document is first loaded.

   Example:
    <TEXTAREA NAME=address ROWS=4 COLS=40>
    Your address here ...
    </TEXTAREA>

   It is recommended that user agents canonicalize line endings to CR, LF
   (ASCII decimal 13, 10) when submitting the field's contents. The
   character set for submitted data should be ISO Latin-1, unless the
   server has previously indicated that it can support alternative
   character sets.

   name
          This specifies a property name that is used to identify the
          textarea field when the form is submitted to the server.

   rows
          Specifies the number of visible text lines. Users should be
          able to enter more lines that this, so user agents should
          provide some means to scroll through the contents of the
          textarea field when the contents extend beyond the visible
          area.

   cols
          Specifies the visible width in average character widths. Users
          should be able to enter longer lines that this, so user agents
          should provide some means to scroll through the contents of the
          textarea field when the contents extend beyond the visible
          area. User agents may wrap visible text lines to keep long
          lines visible without the need for scrolling.



> Do (most) sites generally accept as much data (for some definition of
> "within reason") as the user cares to send back without an error occurring?
> Do they truncate the data?  Or what?  I realize that it is certainly up to
> the site to do with the submitted data as it will, but I'm wondering if
> there are any general guidelines that most sites use, which covers this.
> Fat chance, I know ...

> What I'm getting at though, is *should* lynx allow the user to send an
> unlimited amount of text back to the site, or should it apply a hueristic
> of some sort to the size of the text returned (eg, not more than N times
> the size of the originally specified text area, for some value of N)?

> I don't like making arbitrary restrictions, but OTOH, I also don't want to
> give a user the a false impression that any amount of text is likely to be
> accepted by the site, if that is typically not the case.

> /kim



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