Sending Forms

Section 1 - Introduction
Section 2 - Basics
Section 3 - Next Level
Section 4 - Advanced
      Fancy Lists
      Forms
         How forms are sent
         Input field
         Buttons
         Input types
         Fieldset
         For more help...
         You try it
      Advanced Tables
      Frames
      Style Sheets
      Image Maps
Section 5 - Publishing
Section 6 - Extras
Appendices

Before you start making forms of your own, it's important to understand what they can do and how they do it. Through this, you can learn the good and bad things about forms. I'll keep it simple.

A form is something filled out by the user. The usen can then hit a button that will tell the computer to send the form to you or to do a specific task. This is usually done with a CGI script. What's CGI? It stands for "Common Gateway Interface," but that's really unimportant. What is it? A little program that tells the page what to do with the form. Maybe this will help:

1. The user fills out the form

2. When the user hits enter, the form is sent to a little program (CGI)

3. The program reads the form and sends it where it is supposed to go.

4. Depending on the CGI, information is sent to the user's screen, sends an e-mail, or gives information to you.

CGI scripts are wonderful, but there are a couple problems. First, not all websites allows the use of CGI script. For example, Geocities, (bless their free souls) won't allow CGI to be uploaded. Second, CGI scripts are trickier to write than HTML. The second problem is easy to overcome because there are places online to get free CGI to do basic tasks. The first is trickier, but it can be overcome with scripts.

Scripts are also little programs that tell the computer what to do. They go right inside the HTML document. That little form at the beginning used a script to send you to other pages. Here's the problem with that - you aren't going to learn scripts until Section 6! (You've just started section 4.) As you can guess, we'll be coming back to forms then.

There is one more thing you can do with forms though, but it doesn't always work. You can have the form sent via e-mail to yourself. This isn't always reliable, and it requires the user to be on a computer that has e-mail already set up in the defaults, so it won't work on a public computer. That's the best I can offer you so far. You'll learn how to make a form, but can only e-mail it at the moment.

With that in mind, let's begin learning forms!