I have a simple text area in a form like this:
<textarea style="width:350px; height:80px;" cols="42" rows="5" name="sitelink">
<?php if($siteLink_val) echo $siteLink_val;?>
</textarea>
I keep getting extra white space in this textarea. When I tab into it my cursor is like in the middle of the textarea and not in the beginning? What is the explanation?
Look closely at your code. In it, there are already three line breaks, and a ton of white space before </textarea>. Remove those first so that there are no line breaks in between the tags any more. It might already do the trick.
Note that if($siteLink_val) condition is superfluous in this case and can be safely removed.
What is more important, all HTML output must be obligatory HTML-encoded. Hence your code could be like this
<textarea style="width:350px; height:80px;" cols="42" rows="5" name="sitelink"><?php
echo htmlspecialchars($siteLink_val);
?></textarea>