Tutorial 13: Giving Form to Forms
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For most people, filling out forms has an inexplicable subliminal connection with the phrases "in triplicate," "red tape," and "where do I sign?" In the case of HTML, forms are much worse than that.
OK, I don't want to scare you off quite yet, but there is, as always, a lot to think about when using forms with today's browsers. Hopefully, by now, you'll have grown accustomed to getting a warning like this before every tutorial, and keep your guard up.
HTML forms were the first technology that allowed a user to interact with the Web. Until today, they remain the most fundamental way to achieve this interaction. Although the knowledge required to build a completely form-enabled Web site involves more than HTML (and hence more than is my job to teach you), I'll tell you all about the HTML side of things and refer you to Webreference.com's excellent resources for the rest.
This tutorial does get a bit long-winded at times as we explore all the various kinds of form controls. If you're not interested in the details of these, you can just skim through these sections and refer to them later if you want to write a form using those controls. In this tutorial we explore the following:
- The Formation of Forms
- The ISINDEX element
- Complex forms with the FORM element
- Form encoding
- Form submission
- Encodings and methods: A recap
- Forming a form: Controls
- Text boxes
- Password boxes
- Checkboxes
- Radio buttons
- File selectors
- Hidden controls
- Submit buttons
- Reset buttons
- Graphical submit buttons
- Simple buttons
- Multi-line text boxes with the TEXTAREA element
- Generic buttons with the BUTTON element
- Menu controls
- Menus with sub-menus
- OBJECT elements as form controls
- Disabled controls
- Read-only controls
- Control labels
- Grouping form controls
- Forms and CSS
- Conclusion
- Exercises
