Forms that Work

Foreword

In the beginning—dozens of years ago—research papers crawled out of the primordial ooze somewhere in Switzerland to form the World Wide Web.

People in university basements posted the papers, and people in other university basements around the world could read them. Read-only.

Then one day someone in one of the basements thought, “Wait. Why couldn’t the people who read these things send us information, too?” And thus < form > < /form > was born.

And although no one knew it at the time, e-commerce was born, too, because as Caroline and Gerry explain in the pages you’re about to read, forms enable a conversation between Web publisher and Web user. It was such a powerful and useful idea that there’s hardly a site today that doesn’t have ...