Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Form Controls

A variety of form control elements (also sometimes called “widgets “) are used for gathering information from a form. This section looks at each control and its specific attributes. Every form control (except submit and reset) requires that you give it a name (using the name attribute) so the form-processing application can sort the information. For easier processing of form data on the server, the value of name should not have any character spaces (use underscores or periods instead).

The name attribute works like a variable name. The value provided for name becomes the variable’s name. The content entered by the user into the form control is then assigned to the variable. Of all the attributes, the name attribute is key in passing data from the HTML form to any other place in the page, another page, or out through middleware to a database.