What's the difference between sizing a textarea with cols and rows and sizing a textarea with height and width?
<textarea id="TextArea1" cols="73" rows="12">with cols rows</textarea>
<textarea id="TextArea2" style="height:200px; width:600px";>with CSS</textarea>
cols and rows are relative to font size. height and width aren't.
EDIT: Saying they are relative to "font size" is a bit too simplistic. They take into account things such as line-height and letter-spacing if explicitly set as well.
cols is not relative to font size, and neither is rows, really (rows is relative to line height).
cols relative to then? I guess it's a really a combination of font-size and letter-spacing?cols and rows attributes were required by HTML specifications. W3C HTML5 (approved in 2014) made them optional, but with impractical default values (20 and 2).rows attribute specifies the height in terms of lines (effectively, with the line height as implied unit), and the cols attribute specifies the width in terms of “average” character width, a very vague concept, interpreted very differently by browsers. In CSS, any CSS units can be used and must be explicitly specified.
cols and rows are no longer required in the html5 spec.
rows and cols attributes are not required for the textarea element to pass HTML5 validation, nor are they listed as required by W3C.CSS isn't that different. The result will be (almost) the same.
I'm using most of the time max-width, min-width and the same for height. In new browsers like Chrome you can resize the textarea.
