Why do Textarea's not have a value attribute in PHP?

Textarea's do not have a value attribute in PHP because the content inside a textarea is placed between the opening and closing <textarea> tags. To set the initial value of a textarea in PHP, you can simply echo the content within the textarea tags when generating the HTML output.

&lt;textarea name=&quot;message&quot;&gt;&lt;?php echo $message; ?&gt;&lt;/textarea&gt;