HTML web forms are use to gather information from users, which composes of buttons, checkboxes, and text input fields embedded inside of HTML documents .
HTML forms are placed on a web page using the <form> tag. This tag should encapsulate a series of other form elements, identifying them as a single cohesive web form.
<formg name="myWebForm" action="myServerSideScript.php" method="post"> <input type="checkbox" /> Checkbox 1<br /> <input type="text" /> Text Field 1<br /> <input type="submit" value="SUBMIT" /> </form>
Checkbox 1
Text Field 1
HTML form elements rely on action and method attributes to identify where to send the form data for processing (action) and how to process the data (method). In the code above, we've inserted some make-believe values to represent what a typical HTML form might look like behind the scenes.
Unfortunately, HTML alone is unable to process form data. A scripting language such as PHP, PERL, and/or JavaScript must be used with HTML forms to process data captured by HTML form elements. A complete form-processing example using PHP can be found here: PHP Form Processing Example.
For the purpose of following along, we can also adjust the action property slightly to have the form launch an email client instead of processing a make-believe server-side script. This will provide us with some form interactivity for us as we learn more about HTML forms.