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.
Try It Yourself Before you put a form online, you should do the following:
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