The <Form> Tag
- The first HTML tag that you must understand is the <FORM> tag that begins and ends an HTML form.
- The first thing that the <FORM> tag does is separate the interface widgets from the rest of an HTML page.
- Secondly, the <FORM> tag establishes the relationship between the form and the server that will handle the user-defined data.
- Specifically, the form defines three attributes that manage the interaction. These attributes are shown in the table below:
| Attribute | Description |
|---|---|
| METHOD | Specifies the HTTP method used to send the request. This can be either GET or POST |
| ACTION | Specifies the URL of a script that will process the user-defined data. We will talk about "Scripts" tomorrow. But for now, let's just focus on getting user data to the server. Note that if no action is specified, it will default to the current page. |
| ENCTYPE | Specifies the way in which the form data is encoded before it is sent to the server. This defaults to application/x-www-form-urlencoded |
- Thus, a generic <FORM> tag might look like the following (Notice that we rarely use an ENCTYPE attribute since we usually want the default):
<FORM METHOD = "POST" ACTION = "/cgi-bin/script.cgi"> </FORM>
- Okay, so once we have defined our form, we need to start putting interface widgets into it.
Intro
to HTML Forms
Table of Contents
The <Input> Tag
