Text areas are for larger areas of text, such as a comments entry form for a blog. Oddly, textarea is not specified as the attribute of an <input> tag, but as its own tag.

As you will see, textarea is also an exception to most of the form-specific tags we have seen thus far in that it is a closed tag. If you ever see HTML spilling inside a textarea when you preview a web page, you know that you haven’t closed the <textarea> properly, since the textarea is filled with anything that comes immediately after the opening tag:

1. <label for=“comment” accesskey=“m” >Your comments</label>
2. <textarea name="comment" id=“comment” rows="5" cols="80">
3. This is some default text
4. </textarea>

The size of a <textarea>; is also defined inconsistently, through rows and cols attributes (the number of lines and characters per line that can be displayed in the textarea, respectively).