633717 - incorrect number of rows displayed in textarea form element

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 33654

(Core :: Layout: Form Controls, defect)

Description

[contactme]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; 2.5.0.0)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; de; rv:1.9.1.15) Gecko/20101029 Firefox/3.5.15 Lunascape/6.3.4.23051

The rows count of textarea form elements is wrong.
To verify just use this short html example:

<textarea rows="4" cols="20">1
2
3
4
5
6</textarea>

In MSIE (Trident) and Chrome (Webkit) the textarea's height counts 4 rows as defined in the element, which is as expected and right. But Gecko shows 5 rows. It's always one row more than defined.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
See html code in Details above
Actual Results:  
textarea field height counts 5 rows.

Expected Results:  
textarea field height should count 4 rows.

Comment 2

[contactme]

(In reply to comment #1)
> *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 33654 ***

This is not really a satisfying answer because bug 33654 is about 11 years old and has been stated as "fixed" for at least to times. Then it was a style problem and at the end of 2005 the real problem got lost and now it is just a discussion about where to place scrollbars in textarea form fields.
I assume there will be no solution to this bug for the next couple of years.

I cannot understand that all other browser engine vendors don't have this problem. Why don't you just copy the textarea behaviour from the others to fix this bug?

Helpful information about how w3.org wants to see the textarea behaviour can be found here: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-wg-issue-tracking/2010Sep/0038.html
An interesting point is the following definition from http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/forms.html#edef-TEXTAREA
: "The TEXTAREA element creates a multi-line text input control. User agents should use the contents of this element as the initial value of the control and should render this text initially."

Isn't that clear enough? The initial size of the textarea field has to be the size which is defined in the rows and cols attributes. If the pre-defined values are smaller than 2 rows or 20 columns then it has to be defaulted to these minimum values. That means scrollbars are always inside the textarea field. That's what other rendering engines already do for years.
If the scrollbars were outside then the textarea field would be larger than initially defined.

Please understand that this bug is a problem when creating webpages that should look the same, no matter what browser is used to render/display it.
The current behaviour is not cross-browser compatible and ignores the rows attribute for the textarea element.

Comment 3

[Mounir Lamouri (:mounir)]

I understand that the answer isn't really satisfying and this bug is really old but this is really a duplicate of bug 33654.