textarea's rows, and cols attribute in CSS

<textarea rows="4" cols="50"></textarea>

It is equivalent to:

textarea {
    height: 4em;
    width: 50em;
}

where 1em is equivalent to the current font size, thus make the text area 50 chars wide. see here.


width and height are used when going the css route.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <title>Setting Width and Height on Textareas</title>
        <style>
            .comments { width: 300px; height: 75px }
        </style>
    </head>
    <body>
        <textarea class="comments"></textarea>
    </body>
</html>

I don't think you can. I always go with height and width.

textarea{
width:400px;
height:100px;
}

the nice thing about doing it the CSS way is that you can completely style it up. Now you can add things like:

textarea{
width:400px;
height:100px;
border:1px solid #000000;
background-color:#CCCCCC;
}

As far as I know, you can't.

Besides, that isnt what CSS is for anyway. CSS is for styling and HTML is for markup.