Web Design in a Nutshell

The Basic Form (<form>)

The <form> tag, which is used to designate a form, contains the information necessary for interacting with the CGI program on the server. A form is made up of a number of control elements (text-entry fields, buttons, etc.) used for entering information. When the user has completed the form and presses the “submit” button, the entered data is passed to the CGI program specified by the action attribute.

You can have several forms within a single document, but they cannot be nested and you must be careful they do not overlap.

Figure 12.1 shows a very simple form and its <form> tag.

Figure 12-1. 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. By convention, CGI programs are usually kept in a directory called cgi-bin. In the example in Figure 12.1, the form information is going to a Perl script called mailform.pl which resides in the cgi-bin directory of the current server.

The method attribute

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

Let’s take into consideration a simple form with two fields: one for entering a name, and the other for entering a nickname. If a user enters ...