Personal Independent Networking Project HTML Forms by Chris Smith

What are Forms? Forms make it possible for you to transform your web pages from primarily text and graphics, to interactive “toys”, surveys, and presentations that can provide different options based on the reader’s input.

Anatomy of a Form Creating a form usually involves two independent steps: 1Creating the layout for the form 2Writing a script program on the server side (called a CGI script or program) to process the information you get back from a form.

The Tag To create a form, you use the tag. Inside the opening and closing FORM tags are each of the individual form elements plus any other HTML content to create a layout for that form (paragraphs, headings, tables, and so on.) The opening tag of the FORM element usually includes two attributes: METHOD and ACTION. The METHOD attribute can be either GET or POST, which determines how your form data is sent to the script to process it.

Example of a Simple Form Tell Me Your Name Who are you? <FORM METHOD=POST ENCTYPE=“text/plain”> Enter your Name:

Text Input Fields Text fields enable your reader to type text into a single-line field. Example:

Radio Buttons Radio buttons indicate a list of items, of which only one can be chosen. If one radio button in a list is selected, all the other radio buttons in the same list are deselected. Example: Yes No

Check Boxes Check boxes make it possible to choose multiple items in a list. Each check box can be either on or off (the default is off). Example: Red Blue Pink

Text Areas Text areas are input fields in which the reader can type. Unlike regular text-input fields, text areas can contain many lines of text, making them extremely useful for forms that require extensive input. Example: Enter your message here.

Finished Form Example This finished form is from my personal web page at: Click here for Example Form