Why is textarea filled with mysterious white spaces?

I have a simple text area in a form like this:

<textarea style="width:350px; height:80px;" cols="42" rows="5" name="sitelink">
    <?php if($siteLink_val) echo $siteLink_val; ?> 
</textarea>

I keep getting extra white space in this textarea. When I tab into it my cursor is like in the middle of the textarea and not in the beginning? What is the explanation?

Look closely at your code. In it, there are already three line breaks, and a ton of white space before </textarea>. Remove those first so that there are no line breaks in between the tags any more. It might already do the trick.

Well, everything between <textarea> and </textarea> is used as the default value for your textarea box. There is some whitespace in your example there. Try to eliminate all of that.

Open (and close!) your PHP tags right after, and before, your textarea tags:

<textarea style="width:350px; height:80px;" cols="42" rows="5" name="sitelink"><?php
  if($siteLink_val) echo $siteLink_val;
?></textarea>