  Creating
A Simple Form
Before you can even begin to create a form you have to understand a few
concepts. Up until this point in the lessons, your web pages have been
relatively self contained. When you get into forms you are doing something
a little different - you are communicating not only with a person
(entering data) but often with a web server (to store or format the data).
This is usually the first thing that a beginning webmaster runs into
that forces them to stop thinking of a web page as a totally self
contained unit. That's one of the primary reasons that many people have so
much trouble with them.
As you can see from the simple drawing above, (1) a person
enters data into a form on your web page (2) which accepts all of the
fields (a field is a single piece of information such as a name). When the
person submits the form by clicking the submit button, all of this
information is passed at once to the web server (3) which performs the
appropriate action.
The important fact to remember is step 3. This is the
primary area that I have found people tend to have the most problems.
Step 3 is performed (usually, and there are a few
exceptions) by an external routine. This can be just about anything, as
long as it is able to accept the information and process it as needed.
Remember, no matter which product you are using, even if
it is Frontpage, the same steps are performed (again, with a few
exceptions). Frontpage does include some other steps, which are a little
more complicated and we won't go into them here.
What happens at step 3? The data is received by a program
or routine which executes on the web server. This is a very important fact
to remember - the form causes something to run on a web server. It does
not have to be your own web server - in fact, quite often it is not. But
something has to be executed somewhere to do something with the data from
the form.
All right, all that being said, how do you make a simple
form? First, you must have access to the routine at the web server to
process your data. If you are using Frontpage, you must make sure that
your web host supports Frontpage extensions. Many people use a service
such as offered by Bravenet, which accept form data and send it via
email.
Now design your form. Take a piece of paper and write down
what you want the form to look like. Just draw the boxes and the fields
roughly in the same positions as you want them to appear on the screen.
Okay, the next step is to insert the
<FORM> tag. An example
looks as follows:
<form method="POST"
action="http://www.internet-tips.net/cgi-bin/ennyfrms.cgi">
What this says is simply "when the user clicks the submit
button (whatever it is named) send the form data to "ennyfrms.cgi". It is
up to that routine to perform the necessary action on the data. In this
case, the data is sent via email to the webmaster.
Now enter the form fields one at a time. We will not be
getting into the more complicated fields and options here, just a simple
text field is all we want to do.
<input type="text" size="35" maxlength="256" name="Name">
What this says is "get a text field, make the box 35
characters long, and no long allow more than 256 characters to be
entered". The name is set to "Name".
Remember you can also include all of the formatting that
you want, including descriptions of what to enter, tables, images and
practically anything else that you desire.
All right, you are almost there. When you've got all of
the fields, simply add the code for the submit button, and optionally the
reset button (clears all of the fields).
<input type="submit" value="send">
<input type="reset" value="Clear Form">
Now for the final piece. Just close the form.
</form>
An example of a very simple form is shown below.
That's about all there is to a very simple form.
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