Introduction

When I first learned HTML in the mid 90s, I was amazed, like everyone else, how easy it was to create a Web page and publish information. However, I was disappointed when I discovered that I couldn’t easily have user-submitted form data e-mailed to me and had to resort to the intricacies of Perl, the original server-side scripting language. In short, it was easy to send information to a user’s Web browser, but getting information back from the user was much more difficult.

Over the intervening 12 or so years, that situation has not really changed. Forms continue to be the primary method by which visitors send data to the Web sites they use, and if you want your visitors to be able to communicate with your site, you have to learn ...

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