HTML Forms Are Our Friends

Posted by admin on April 04th 2008 to Living With The Web

This is a very short tutorial on the creation of a HTML form,
that used the PHP form processor located in the PHP part of the
forum. First, I’d like to explain how forms work, because it’s
not always as obvious as one would think. Basically, the HTML
form is used to store the information into variables, such as
name, email address, and comments, etcetera. These variable are
then sent to something called a form processor and processed
into any format you choose, they are then sent to the address
mentioned in the form processor.

Once you read this tutorial you may be able to understand it a
little better.

First off, let me show an example of a simply HTML form that
asks the person for the name, email, and comments.

Contact Us

name="email">

You’ll notice I included some HTML tags to show you were this
form would normally be found, even know most of you would
already know. Let’s break this down a little bit now.

This tag begins the form and tells the browser that anything
after this is a form, and to recognize it as this. the Action in
this form is process.php which can be found in the PHP board of
the forum on my website. The action will always be the file that
you wish to use to process the information on the form, so that
it’s readable. The method is used to POST, or place, the
information from the form onto the form processor, or in this
case process.php.

This is a simple text box. The type tells the HTTP that it’s a
text box, and the name gives the name of the variable to be
stored.