Creating Forms: Introduction
Creating Forms
Introduction
If you want to give your readers the ability to interact with your site — to send information to it, rather than simply receiving information from it — you’ll need to move beyond basic HTML. Forms gather information from your users. If you’ve ever used a search engine or entered a login name and password on a Web site, you’ve seen a form in action.
A form is a block of HTML containing various inputs — ways of gathering information from a user. An input can be anything from a text box where visitors type their name to a check box used to select a desired option.
Think of a form as the first runner in a relay race. It hands off the information it’s gathered from users to a script or program that processes that information, whether it’s searching for related Web pages or authenticating a user’s login name and password. Once the script is finished, it passes its results to a different Web page, where those results are displayed. Without a form, the “relay race” would never get started; in order to accomplish anything, though, that form needs to work together with the other two “runners.”