What are the cons of using a contentEditable div rather than a textarea?

Question

Would I be shooting myself in the foot by using a div with attribute contentEditable=\"true\" as a text field rather than a textarea?

Answer 1

The Gmail's mail edit box is also a div with contenteditable="true". The major benefit is it has auto-adjust height as user input text/content. Also it supports rich text inside. You can mimic the Textarea by setting a max height if need.

On the other hand if you want auto height in Textarea, you might have to use js to bind some listener to the oninput hook.