Bug: Topic with form: textarea field ignores width

A form with a text area field ignores the width setting from the form. In internet explorer 6 a text area becomes so wide that you can hardly see the scroll bar on the right side. This makes it close to impossible to make forms with text areas that people can use. I noticed that with skin=classic the field has the right width. So the error is probably in the style sheets of the pattern skin.

With IE this is so annoying that it blocks my use of forms with a text area.

Test case

Look up this topic with your browser. http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Sandbox/TestTextArea. Edit it and note the text box which is supposed to be 40 characters wide. In Internet Explorer the text field is so wide that you cannot use the scroll bar on the right.

Environment

-- KennethLavrsen - 19 Oct 2004

Impact and Available Solutions

Follow up

After I posted this bug report some nice people in the TWiki IRC channel I got the hints I needed to actually resolve this bug.

See fix record

Fix record

There seems to be a missing style definition in ..../pub/TWiki/PatternSkin/style.css

Just below the definition for .twikiEditPage .twikiEditFormTextField I added these 3 lines defining the style twikiEditFormTextAreaField

.twikiEditPage .twikiEditFormTextAreaField {
   width:auto;
}

With these 3 lines the textarea field follows the width given by the table in the form topic.

Someone knowing style sheets better than I should perhaps confirm that I did it the right way. If so this fix should be added to the distribution.

-- KennethLavrsen - 19 Oct 2004

Per advice from the #twiki IRC channel I have assigned it to Arthur. I assume being a assigned a bug with a fix is not too bad.

-- KennethLavrsen - 24 Oct 2004

I would use something more generic:

textarea {width:auto;}

-- MattWilkie - 25 Oct 2004

OK, fixed in DevelopBranch r3641 as per Kenneth's fix.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 17 Feb 2005

I prefer mine. PatternSkin css is over engineered already, and I honestly have not thought of an instance yet where having all textarea's autowidth's would be unwanted.

-- MattWilkie - 20 Feb 2005

Matt, I'm sure it's better. But I'm a CSS beginner only, and do not want to risk breaking too much. If you have a better implementation, please provide it in the form of a patch and I'll put it in.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 06 Mar 2005

I commited the

textarea {width:auto;}

-- ArthurClemens - 19 Mar 2005