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I have a simple feedback form (see screenshot) on each page on a site. The user has to select whether the page was helpful or not (radio buttons yes/no) and there is also a text area input where the user can add extra information about how we could improve the page.

Would you recommend I have a character limit on this field (i've seen it done on other sites that are similar to mine) and if so, what would be a reasonable character limit to set?

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N.b. I can't find a similar question about character limits on feedback/comment fields so please edit if there is a similar question already posted (I'm surprised I can't find one).

Dave Haigh
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  • bear in mind that frameworks like asp.net have a maxrequestlimit setting, you'll want to make sure this is greater than the content youre allowing users to submit. it probably is by default, but just fyi – Andrew Bullock Jun 12 '12 at 11:00

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According to w3.org - http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html3/textarea.html :-

Note: In the initial design for forms, multi-line text fields were supported by the INPUT element with TYPE=TEXT. Unfortunately, this causes problems for fields with long text values as SGML limits the length of attribute literals. The HTML 2.0 DTD allows for up to 1024 characters (the SGML default is only 240 characters).

So perhaps limit it to 1024 characters?

EDIT:

Actually, this is a very interesting question(!) as I believe this was probably introduced at this point for memory reasons ( believe this to be 1Kb if a character is 1byte(?) but I can't seem to find if this limit has ever been increased! It seems resonable that this should have been - so will have a further look.

Llamalaa
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  • The cited document is part of the HTML 3 draft that expired a long time. It’s completely irrelevant for any purpose other than studying the history of HTML. And no browser I ever used allowed multi-line text in INPUT (and I remember the time when Mosaic was the WWW). – Jukka K. Korpela Jun 12 '12 at 11:13
  • This does not apply because a `textarea` element does not use an attribute to set initial content. – Joey Jun 12 '12 at 11:14
  • This is a fair comment as I pointed this out but it also was reconfirmed within HTML 4.0 and does actually have some relevancy as formail.php still uses the default value as 1024 (I believe) and many other scripts that are not that current may also have this limit built in. I understand that HTML 5 does not have a limit - but the question was should a limit be set... This seems to differ from site to site and would possibly be set dependant upon usage within the site / or application. – Llamalaa Jun 12 '12 at 11:17