As you can see, the wonderful world of forms is full of different types of form controls for your visitors. This truly is a way to make your web pages interactive.
Be cautious, however. Web surfers who are constantly bombarded with forms are likely to get tired of all that typing and move on to another site. You need to give them a reason for playing!
Table 10.1 summarizes the HTML tags used today. Remember these points and you can't go wrong:
Table 10.1. Today's HTML Tags
Tag | Use |
|---|
<form> | Creates an HTML form. You can have multiple forms within a document, but you cannot nest the forms. |
action | An attribute of <form> that indicates the server-side script (with a URL path) that processes the form data. |
enctype | An attribute of the <form> tag that specifies how form data is encoded before being sent to the server. |
method | An attribute of <form> that defines how the form data is sent to the server. Possible values are get and post. |
<input> | A <form> element that creates controls for user input. |
type | An attribute of <input> that indicates the type of form control. Possible values are shown in the following list: |
text | Creates a single-line text entry field. |
password | Creates a single-line text entry field that masks user input. |
submit | Creates a Submit button that sends the form data to a server-side script. |
reset | Creates a Reset button that resets all form controls to their initial values. |
checkbox | Creates a check box. |
radio | Creates a radio button. |
image | Creates a button from an image. |
button | Creates a pushbutton. The three types are Submit, Reset, and Push, with no default. |
hidden | Creates a hidden form control that cannot be seen by the user. |
file | Creates a file upload control that enables users to select a file with the form data to upload to the server. |
<button> | Creates a button that can have HTML content. |
<textarea> | A text-entry field with multiple lines. |
<select> | A menu or scrolling list of items. Individual items are indicated by the <option> tag. |
<option> | Individual items within a <select> element. |
<label> | Creates a label associated with a form control. |
<fieldset> | Organizes form controls into groups. |
<legend> | Displays a caption for a <fieldset> element. |
