Topic:
One of HTML's most innovative and advanced features is its ability to solicit information from a user, process that information, and ship it to a Web server. In turn, the server processes that information and returns a new document.
The Web gains this ability through the Common Gateway Interface (CGI). CGI is a set of communication standards that Web servers and browsers use to transfer information. A Fill-In Form (or just Form) is the HTML document viewed in a browser that requests information from the user. On the server side is a program, usually called a script, that can process the retrieved data and create a new HTML document to send back to the browser. The complicated programming required for creating a working Form page with CGI scripts is beyond the scope of this book.
However, there are numerous on-line resources and other printed materials about writing scripts or outright code, working with Web servers, and designing advanced Form pages that we list in the URLs section below.
In this document, we show you what form tags look like and how to write an HTML document that contains form fields. We also point you to some easy to alter pre-written scripts that you can incorporate into your own Web documents.
There are five HTML tags that are exclusively associated with forms. They are:
Here is a simple FORM code block:
<FORM METHOD="POST" ACTION="/cgi/filename">
Name: <INPUT NAME="name" TYPE="TEXT"
SIZE="20" MAXLENGTH="40"><P>
Gender: M <INPUT NAME="gender" TYPE="RADIO" VALUE="male">
F <INPUT NAME="gender" TYPE="RADIO"
VALUE="female"><P>
Comment: <BR> <TEXTAREA NAME="comments" ROWS="10" COLS="65"></TEXTAREA><P>
</FORM><P>
This is the result when this code block is used in a document:
Creating the document side of a Fill-In Form is a simple task. On the other hand, writing the processing program to handle the input and response to the data can be a difficult task. Please look through the materials listed in the URLs section below for an in-depth look at Form and CGI coding.
There some pre-written scripts and programs designed to allow non-programmers to add the power of forms and CGI to their Web documents. Each utility has full instructions for setup, coding and operation.