I was hoping to leverage a contenteditable div to act like a automatically-growing textarea in a character sheet. I don't actually know whether such a div would save its value onblur (probably not), but I was experimenting. Unfortunately, it seems the contenteditable attribute gets stripped entirely at render time. This: <div contenteditable="true">foo</div> Becomes this: <div>foo</div> Of course, in order for contenteditable to be useful , it would also need to be able to save the value to an attribute. I doubt that's the case right now, but it's impossible to check when the contenteditable attribute gets stripped out. <!-- these two ought to have equivalent functionality --> <textarea name="attr_example"></textarea> <div name="attr_example" contenteditable="true"></div>