So far you have made websites that are very static. Which means that the user can only read what you have written. However, with forms you can add some interavtivity into your site.
Forms could be used to conduct a poll, survey, allow users to voice comments and so on. So how do we make them? Well if your really good at the HTML game, guess what tag is need to make a form.
The < FORM> Tag
So to tell the computer that you want to create an online form you start this way:
< FORM >
</FORM>
Now all the information gathered by the form needs to be processed by a script. We have to tell the computer where the script is. (You will find out more information in A Note About Forms). We add this attribute:
< FORM ACTION = "scriptaddress">
</FORM>
ACTION = "action" tells the browser which script to link to. This is most often a CGI (Common Gateway Interface) script which e-mails you the results of your form. It is one thing to make a form in HTML and another to get the result of the form sent to you. Please see A Note About Forms for more information about the action part.
Forms also need a method to pass the information. The METHOD attribute is also added to the FORM tag. Two values are allowed POST or GET.
< FORM ACTION = "scriptaddress" METHOD = "POST">
</FORM>
The METHOD part of the < FORM> tag has two values POST (which is used to send lengthy pieces of data, like survey, comment, (and most) forms.) The GET part acts differently it adds the response to the URL of the CGI script. GET is used for forms with less than 10 fields (excluding textareas), but I would strongly recommend that you use POST for all your forms.
Putting all this together we get this outcome:
< FORM ACTION = "scriptaddress" METHOD = "POST">
</FORM>
The Submit and Reset Buttons
At the end of your form you will want to have two buttons. One that allows the user to submit the form (the action part of the FORM tag now takes effect) and the Reset button (which is optional) that allows a user to clear the form and start over.
The Code
The Result
Some people don't like those ugly, drab, dull grey buttons. So they use an image which you click on that acts as the submit button. How do you do that?
That's it for the general form of a form! In the next few tutorials we will learn all of the different form objects we can include. The first one we will look at is how to make a text box.
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Let's look at the beginnings of HTML code. Continue to General Form
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