Form textarea question

I am designing a site for a customer that is wanting a form including a text box. He wants to limit his customers to the number of words or characters entered in the text box. I am writing the code as follows:

<P style="text-align: left;"> Comments: <br />
<textarea name="comments" id="comments" rows="10" cols="80" maxchar="10">Type your comments here.</textarea>
</P>

Can anyone tell me what I need to insert into the code to limit the amount of words or characters to 1000 characters?
Thanks..
beenie

 

I dont think that it is possible to limit the number of characters entered using just HTML, it is probably easiest done using JavaScript. http://javascript.internet.com/forms/limit-characters-and-words-entered.html

 

That was EXACTALLY what I was wanting. I can't thank you enough for making my work easier.