problem in DreamWeaver formatting text fields in forms

[tricky39]

I spent a couple of hours taking advantage of the fine facilities in DW for formatting forms and it looked great with all the fields lined up and ready to go until I loaded into the preview in browser. All the text fields were larger than in DW, thus pushing all the text along on the same line, so it went onto the next line, basically looking a right bloody mess! All my fields were defined in the Properties box as x characters long, so, in my rather simple world, they should be x characters long in the browser, but they weren't!! So I assume, that Dw and the browser are taking the characters as being different, hence the different size boxes, but who knows. Anyway can anyone help me with this problem, it's the first time I've seen a WYSIWYG editor not give me what I've seen.