Possible to add line breaks in a textarea field while keeping it XHTML 1.0 valid?

Answer 1

Have you tried adding a xml:space="preserve" attribute and use just plain normal line breaks?

Answer 2

Why not use regular linebreaks? Those work just fine.

If you want <br /> to appear, you need to encode those entities:

<br />

Answer 3

From the DTD:

<!ELEMENT TEXTAREA - - (#PCDATA) -- multi-line text field -->

In the XHTML code of your page, a <textarea> can only contain text (#PCDATA), and you cannot nest any XHTML elements within the <textarea>.

Your questions seems to show two different things. The image shows "<br />" written into a <textarea>, while the message from the W3C Validator is referring to a <br /> element written into the XHTML of your page within the <textarea> element.

In the first case, having "Test<br />line break" appear to the user in the text area is done by using the appropriate entities, just as altCognito wrote:

<textarea>Test&lt;br /&gt;line break</textarea>

Anything that's being entered by the user that is then redisplayed within a <textarea> on a new page should be encoded (i.e., use entities for &, ", ', <, and >).

If want to display a user's entry:

Test<br />line break

...as...

Test
line break

...within another text area, then you will need to parse what has been entered into the original <textarea> and replace the user-entered <br />s with normal line breaks. See Lucero's answer.