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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-08T18:15:04+00:00

There seems to be a problem with the ASP textbox control when set to

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There seems to be a problem with the ASP textbox control when set to multiline and serving the page as xhtml. The project I am working on uses content negotiation to serve asp pages as application/xhtml+xml to browsers which support it. The problem is when asp textbox renders a textarea to the page, it explicitly prepends a newline to the text. Reflection of the textbox’s render method looks like the following:

if (TextMode == TextBoxMode.MultiLine)
HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(Environment.NewLine + this.Text, (TextWriter) writer);

When firefox and opera are served this with xhtml content type, they interpret the newline as part of the text in the textarea and so I get extra newlines at the beginning of my text areas.

I could subclass textbox and override render, but that seems like a bit of overkill to correct something like this. Is there another way to correct this? And does anyone know why asp textbox does this anyway?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    An alternative to subclassing is to use control adapters, or to write the <textarea by hand and get ASP.NET to generate the control name attribute for you.

    I suspect ASP.NET WebForms does this simply because of a short-sight. The future is MVC anyway, so don’t expect this to be changed any time soon. I suspect the original purpose of the newline is to give the textarea a “value” rather than nothing (thus making the textarea “successful” in HTML forms parlance).

    This isn’t the only odd behaviour you’ll see in ASP.NET. The atrocious HTML formatting of <head runat="server"> is also on the list.

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