Forms

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Forms

Many sites, some of the best, have forms. These serve various purposes:

polls
asking for password
asking for comments
customer info

Building the form (you can have more than one form on a page) is easy. Having it send the data to you, one way or another, is not easy to describe. It is not difficult to do. But, how it is done varies from one ISP (Internet service provider) to another. Or you can get your forms from some other site or CD, and have some program somewhere process the data, and send the results to your page.

With my ISP, the first line of the form looks like this:

<FORM METHOD="POST" ACTION="http://www.imt.net/cgi-bin/cgiemail/~jimloy/computer/forms.txt">

We have the <FORM> tag, with a method equal to "POST," and action equal to what looks like a URL. Well, it is not a normal URL. Cgiemail is a CGI program on my ISP's computer which takes the data, along with a file of mine called /computer/forms.txt, and composes email from them and sends it. Here is forms.txt:

From: [email]
To: bogus@bogus.bogus
Subject: [subject]

Name: [name]
input stuff: [CheckBox1]
radio buttons: [Radio1]
select box: [Select1]
button: [Button1]
password: [Password1]

Comments: [comments]

The names in square brackets are the field names of data from the form. The data labeled "From:", "To:", and "Subject:" go into the header of the email. I have hard coded the "To" address into forms.txt, and the other two come from the form. I have hard coded the subject into the form itself. Everything else in forms.txt is just to format the data. I get email saying things like:

From: Bill@whatever.kom
To: bogus@bogus.bogus
Subject: Forms test

Name: Britney Spears
input stuff: checked
radio buttons: on, off
select box: item1
button: on
password: realblonde

Comments: Here are some stupid comments.

The above may or may not be similar to what you must do to process forms. Your ISP probably has instructions on how to do this on their WWW page. If not, contact their technical support. By the way bogus@bogus.bogus is not my real email address; Click Send me email if you want to send me email.

Here are some of the controls that you can use:

hidden data:
<INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="subject" VALUE="Forms test"> which just assigns data to a variable name ("subject" in this case).
text box:
<INPUT TYPE="TEXT" NAME="name" VALUE="your name" SIZE="20"> which allows a string of text to be typed. "Your name" is the default value, and size="20" is the width of the field.
check box:
<INPUT TYPE="CHECKBOX" NAME="CheckBox1" CHECKED="CHECKED" VALUE="checked">
radio button:
<INPUT TYPE="RADIO" NAME="Radio1" VALUE="Value1" CHECKED="CHECKED"> Each of these, in a set of related radio buttons, has the same name, but different values. The default button is set at "checked."
password:
<INPUT TYPE="PASSWORD" NAME="Password1"> This is similar to a text box, except that asterisks appear on the screen when the user types the password. There are probably ways to encrypt and decrypt passwords.
text area:
<TEXTAREA NAME="comments" ROWS="5" COLS="50" WRAP="Physical"></TEXTAREA> This is a multiple line text area which scrolls if the user types enough lines of text. Wrap="Physical" means that the words wrap as the user types.
list box: A pull-down list to select from. I can't get this one to work. May not be standard.
button: I haven't gotten this one to work. This may not be standard.
reset button:
<INPUT TYPE="RESET" NAME="Reset1" VALUE="Reset form"> Any form with several controls should have a reset button, so the user can erase the form and start over.
submit button:
<INPUT TYPE="SUBMIT" NAME="Submit1" VALUE="Submit form"> Every form must have a submit button. There is also a graphic submit button option, so you can design your own submit button.

That was the end of the form, which ends with the </FORM> tag. Above the form was mainly an unordered list, which is not necessary. It can contain text or tables.

The above does not expain everything, as you will have to deal with your ISP and/or someone who provides form service. Regardless, you should be able to control the formatting of the form itself.

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