Intro to Forms

Forms are used to let your visitors interact with something outside the realm of your web page. There are several ways to use forms:

• Send data that your visitor enters to an email address.

• Send data that your visitor enters to some sort of server-side processing program.

• Combine with javascript to implement some sort of client-side processing, such as a tic-tac-toe game or a self-assessment quiz.

A form consists of "gadgets" that your visitor can fill in. These gadgets include:

To create a form, you include a <form>...</form> tag. The <form> tag includes some attributes that tell the browser what to do when the form is submitted. Within the <form> tag, you can include tags for the various gadgets: <input>, <textarea> and <select>. You can also include text, images and other HTML elements. You can include block tags, so you can place things like paragraphs, lists and tables within the <form> tag.

On the following pages, I'll first discuss the various form gadgets. Then I'll discuss the <form> tag. Finally, I'll discuss some extra form features that were added for HTML 4.0 — these are supported by IE 4+ and Netscape 6, but not by Netscape 4.