How to retain textbox value after refresh

[smee bond]

I have a simple jsp page where I have a textbox. When I enter some data in the textbox and hit 'refresh', the data disappears. Is there a way to retain the textbox data either in jsp/html after refresh? please help!

Thank you.

[Ben Souther]

HTML textboxes have a "value" property.

<input type="text" name="firstName" value="smee" />

[Jeff Rummings]

If refresh re-submits the form, then yes. You can use the value attribute to retain input's value. For example,

<input type="text" name="xxx" value="yyy">

[smee bond]

Sorry for not providing the complete details about the problem. Here is the situation:

I have a parent window (not a form, just a plain parent.html) where I have a link (<a href="" />)from which I am opening a child window (child.jsp form). I have a few check boxes on the child. When I select the checkboxes and press submit on child window, the selected values are sent and populated in <textarea /> of parent.html through javascript. Till this point it works fine.
But when I go back to the parent window and press refresh/click on the link to open child window, the value <textarea /> is gone! How do I retain this value? please help. thank you!

[Gregg Bolinger]

<textarea>${ someValue }</textarea>

[Ben Souther]

You can't with your current approach.

If the amount of data in the checkboxes is small, instead of setting the values using Javascript directly, use Javascript to refresh the window with the values in the querystring.