Web Design in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

The Basic Form (<form>)

The <form> tag, which is used to designate a form, contains the information necessary for interacting with a program on the server. A form is made up of a number of controls (checkboxes, menus, text-entry fields, buttons, etc.) used for entering information. When the user has completed the form and presses the “submit” button, the browser takes the information, arranges it into name/value pairs, encodes the information for transfer, and then sends it off to the server.

You can have several forms within a single document, but they cannot be nested, and you must be careful they do not overlap. Figure 15-1 shows a very simple form and its <form> tag.

Figure 15-1. A simple form

The action Attribute

The action attribute in the <form> tag provides the URL of the program to be used for processing the form. In the example in Figure 15-1, the form information is going to a Perl script called guestbook.pl, which resides in the cgi-bin directory of the current server (by convention, CGI programs are usually kept in a directory called cgi-bin).

The method Attribute

The method attribute specifies one of two methods, either get or post, by which the information from the form can be transmitted to the server. Form information is typically transferred in a series of name=value pairs, separated by the ampersand (&) character.

Let’s take into consideration a simple form with ...