Forms (page 1) - Web Development Process

This site explains how to use this tool to create a form and incorporate it into a web page. In order to use this create forms, you should posses the following:

Knowledge of form elements
Some exposure to HTML
Access to the Stoutinfo web server
Knowledge of FTP process using WS-FTP or Fetch

Form fundamentals

Like all HTML components the form has a starting and ending tag. This tells the browser that there will be form related components between the opening tag and ending tag. Let's look at an example:

<form action="/cgi-bin/form_processor.cgi" method="POST"> ... </form>

The action part of the tag tells the form where it is going to send its data and the method tells it how to do it.

Other form related tags are:

Tag	Attributes	Descriptions
`<input>`	`type= name= value=`	The type attribute can be any of the following: `hidden`, `checkbox`, `radio`, `submit`, `reset`, and `text` The `name` and `value` can be set to anything.
`<select>`	`name=`	This is a selection list, where the user can choose something in the list. The `name` can be set to anything.
`<option>`	`value=`	The option tag is placed between the `selection` tags and are the options that the user can choose in the list. The `value` is set to reflect the list option which can be just about anything.
`<textarea>`	`name=`	The `textarea` is what is usually used for entering data in long comments. The `name` can be set to anything.

Example form

Let's look at a simple form:

And here is the HTML that made it:

<form action="/cgi-bin/form_processor.cgi" method="post">
    <div>
        <label for="name">Name:</label>
        <input type="text" id="name" name="Name" tabindex="1" />
    </div>
    <div>
        <label for="email">Email:</label>
        <input type="text" id="email" name="Email" tabindex="2" />
    </div>
    <div>
        <label for="comments">Comments</label>
        <textarea name="Comments" cols="20" rows="3" tabindex="3"></textarea>
    </div>
    <div id="submitdiv">
        <input type="submit" name="Submit" value="Submit This" tabindex="4" />
        <input type="reset" />
    </div>
</form>

With programs like FrontPage you do not have to write the underlying HTML yourself but it is good to know what is happening so that you can write your setup_file later on without too much difficulty.

Page 2: Our form processor: Information about how a form is parsed

Forms processing

Form fundamentals

Example form