[kwokwai]

<textarea rows="2" cols="4" name="comments">

The above html tag will display users a textarea with 4 columns and 2 rows, but I found that I can enter as many words as I want into the textarea.

There is a restriction tag for input textbox, like maxlength="12".
But I don't know why I can't apply maxlength to restrict the number of words that are allowed to be entered in the textarea!

[office politics]

http://www.devguru.org/Technologies/..._textarea.html

looks like you would have to write some javascript validation to throw an error if the textarea contains too many characters.

[jcortes]

ya you will need to write some javascript to do that. there is no maxlength attribute on a textarea