What are the cons of using a contentEditable div r

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

It's not the same thing. First semantically, the purpose of a textarea is to write/edit plain text whereas with contentEditable you can edit list for instance (see: htmldemo) Second the behavior is also different. For example, in chrome when you test the link below and that you delete all the content you loose the focus (the div element disappear) which is not the expected behavior, or if it is it's idiot.

Answer 2

It would work fine, but it'd be a little bit more difficult than a form, simply because you're going to have to wire up your own logic to make the button's click event track down the correct div, get its content, and then perform the submission. The advantage of a textarea is that the browser takes care of all that for you.