Why is there an element instead of
?
It was a limitation of the technology at the time it was created. My answer copied over from Programmers.SE:
From one of the original HTML drafts:
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. SGML's default (Reference Quantity Set) limits the length of attribute literals to only 240 characters. The HTML 2.0 SGML declaration increases the limit to 1024 characters.