Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference

Name

SIZE — NN all IE all HTML all

Synopsis

SIZE=”elementWidth"

Optional

In practice, the SIZE attribute is limited to describing the character width of text field INPUT elements. The actual rendered width is calculated based on the font setting (or default font) for the element, but the results are not always perfect. Variations in font rendering (and the ability to specify alternate font faces and sizes in Internet Explorer) sometimes lead to unexpectedly narrower fields. Therefore, it is not wise to automatically set the SIZE and MAXLENGTH attributes to the same value without testing the results on a wide variety of browsers and operating systems with worst-case data (for example, all “m” or “W” characters in proportional fonts). The HTML 4.0 specification indicates that the SIZE attribute might be applied to other INPUT element types, but as of the Version 4 browsers, this is not the case. In the meantime, you can use CSS-Positioning to make buttons wider than the default size that tracks the width of the VALUE attribute string.

Input Types

password, text

Example

<INPUT TYPE="text" NAME="ZIP" MAXLENGTH=10 SIZE=12>

Value

Any positive integer.

Default

20

Object Model Reference

IE

[window.]document.formName.inputName.size

[window.]document.forms[i].elements[i].size

[window.]document.all.elementID.size