Invalid value for @cols in default theme comments.php textarea element?

[sampablokuper]

In the default theme, comments.php has a textarea element thus:

<textarea name="comment" id="comment" cols="100%" rows="10" tabindex="4"></textarea>

If I'm not mistaken, the cols attribute should be a number (not a percentage), according to, e.g., ​http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/forms.html#h-17.7 and ​http://www.velocityreviews.com/forums/t153587-html-forms-and-liquid-designs.html and

Looks very ok to me, in current trunk there is a CSS width of 100% in style.css therefore this should be pretty alright.

Is there a specific argument for having cols="58 " instead of let's say 71?

Replying to hakre:

Is there a specific argument for having cols="58 " instead of let's say 71?

Yes. I removed "width: 100%" in FireBug and strted playing with the value of cols. 58 looks almost the same as width: 100%.

can wait until 2.8.1

But must not.

the patch *might* break a child theme here and there that overrides the font

Replying to Denis-de-Bernardy:

the patch *might* break a child theme here and there that overrides the font

Are you sure?

1. Those who remove width: 100% from CSS I guess know what they do
2. cols="100%" is invalid XHTML and is either ignored by the user agent or interpretes is as "100" (which, without CSS, is not good at all).
3. At any rate, width: 100% in CSS overrules the width calculated from the cols attribute.

width=100% occasionally wrecks havok in IE6 (or was that FF2?).

either way, it's just validation stuff. it's been invalid for years, it's not a regression, it won't hurt to be invalid for another month.

Well that is not the appropriate argumentation to deal with defects. You can use that argument for any bug, especially those that are in for a long time. That is pretty contra-productive with that much legacy codebase that is in WordPress.

still applies clean

one week to left for "another month" :D.

Can't quite see why we have cols here at all.

Why can't we just rely on the css to set the width?

Replying to westi:

Why can't we just rely on the css to set the width?

Because cols and rows are required attributes of textarea in (X)HTML.

Fixed in [11867]