Dreamweaver CS4: The Missing Manual

Chapter 11. Forms

A Web site is a great way to broadcast a message, announce a new product, post late-breaking news, or just rant about the state of the world. But that’s all one-way communication, which you may find a bit limiting. You may be curious to get some feedback from your audience. Or you may want to build your business by selling your product online, and you need a way to gather vital stats from customers. If you want to receive information as well as deliver it, it’s time to add forms to your Web design repertoire (see Figure 11-1 for a simple example). Whatever type of information you need to collect on your site, Dreamweaver’s form objects make the task easy.

Form Basics

A form begins and ends with the HTML <form> tag. The opening <form> tag indicates the beginning of the form, and sets its properties; the closing </form> tag, of course, marks the form’s end.

In between these tags, different objects provide the basic user-interface elements of the form. Radio buttons, text fields, and pull-down menus are just a few of the ways you can gather input. It’s perfectly OK to include other HTML elements inside a form, too. In fact, your site’s visitors would be lost if you couldn’t also add (and format) text that explains each form object’s purpose. And if you don’t use a table or Cascading Style Sheets to lay out a form in an organized way, it can quickly become an unreadable mess (see the box on Pull-Down Menus and Lists).

Figure 11-1. A form can be as simple as a single empty ...