Attribute "wrap" of the textarea tag

Question

What is the usefulness of the attribute wrap tag textarea?

What is the difference between your values soft, hard, off?

Answer 1

The wrap attribute specifies how the text in the textarea element is to be adjusted when a form is submitted.

Soft: The text in the widget is not adjusted when it is submitted in a form. This is the default value.

Hard: The text in the element is adjusted (containing new lines) when it is submitted in a form. When hard is used, the attribute cols must be specified.

EDIT

This makes it a great way to give users an example or description of how to proceed to fill the text area field. Something like, "Please limit your response to 100 characters," would be an ideal description.

References:

HTML wrap Attribute

Tizag - HTML - textareas

Answer 2

Just to complement the other answer, as the documentation MDN

Specifies how to break the text in <textarea>

• hard: The browser automatically inserts line breaks (CR+LF) at the time the form is submitted so that each line does not exceed the field width limit, the attribute cols must be specific.

• soft: (this is the standard heat if omitted wrap="") The browser ensures that all line breaks in value consist of a pair (CR+LF), but does not insert any additional line breaks when the form is submitted.

According to the W3.org are of the values (soft and hard) are new HTML5 features, even if it works in some old browsers, maybe it was not standard.

Note:

• Carriage Return (CR, 0x0D, r) moves the cursor to the beginning of the line without moving to the next line. This character is used as a new line character in Commodore and Early Machintosh operating systems (OS-9 and older).
• Line feed (LF, 0x0A, n) moves the cursor to the next line without returning to the beginning of the line. This character is used as a new line character in UNIX-based systems (Linux, MAC OSX, etc)

Source: http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/2856874215F6134A862576C400554081