How HTML Forms Work
Before you learn the HTML tags that are used to make your own forms, you should understand how the information that someone fills out on a form makes its way back to you. You also probably need to have the person who runs your web server computer set it up to process your forms.
Every form must include a button for the user to submit the form. When someone clicks that button, all the information he filled in is sent (in a standard format) to an Internet address that you specify in the form itself. You have to put a special forms-processing program at that address in order for that information to get to you, or you can choose to receive the formatted information via email.
Almost all ISP companies that offer web page hosting also provide preprogrammed scripts to their customers for processing forms. You don't need to use a script if you only want to have form information sent to your email address. Scripts allow you to take things a step further by somehow processing form information and possibly saving it to a database or routing it to a web service such as a secure payment service. A form-processing script usually generates some sort of reply page and sends it back to be displayed for the user.
It's possible to set things up so that much of the information from a form is interpreted and processed automatically. For example, server software exists to authorize a credit-card transaction automatically over the Internet, confirm an order to the customer's email address, and enter the order directly into your company's in-house database for shipment. Obviously, setting up that sort of thing can get quite complex, and it's beyond the scope of this book to explain all the things you can do with form data after it has been submitted.
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Most ISPs that host web pages already have a "generic" form-processing script set up and will happily tell you the exact HTML code required to use it. If your ISP can't do this, or charges you an extra fee for it, frankly you are probably not using a very good ISP! In that case, you have the following choices:
Switch to a more helpful web hosting service. Learn advanced server programming. Use a form-creation service such as freedback.com to create and process your forms. (Although such services are free and work great, they will display other companies' advertising to everyone who uses your forms.)
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Try It Yourself Before you put a form online, you should do the following: - Ask your ISP what it offers in the way of form-processing scripts, along with the exact address to which your forms should send their information. Later in this hour, you'll see where and how to put that address into your forms.
- If you run your own web server computer, the server software probably came with some basic form-processing scripts. Consult your documentation to set them up properly and find the address on your server where each is located.
- If you're not sure what scripts are available and you want to start with the simplest form-processing approach, configure your forms to simply send the raw form data to your email address. The examples in this hour use such a technique. You can experiment with fancy scripts later.
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