Forms are used for many purposes all over the Web. They are used by search engines to accept keywords and by online stores to process e-commerce shopping carts.

Web sites use forms to help with a variety of functions ranging from accepting visitor feedback, encouraging visitors to send a news story to a friend or colleague, collecting email addresses for a newsletter, and accepting order information.

This chapter introduces a very powerful tool for web developers - using forms on web pages to accept information from your visitors.

Example Sites	Forms & Usability
Yahoo! Ebay Amazon	Web Developers Library Evolt.org on Forms Forms That Work Effective Use of Forms
Free Remote Server-Side Processing	CGI Resources
Formbuddy FormMail Master.com Hosted Scripts Freedback.com Response-O-Matic	NCSA Overview W3C Resource Worldwide Mart Scripts CGI Resource Index Extropia
Internet Explorer 6 and "mailto"
The text discourages the use of invoking your visitor's e-mail application to process a form. There is a new reason why this should be avoided -- it is not fully supported by Internet Explorer 6. When using "mailto: with Internet Explorer 6 in a form's action, the e-mail application will launch but your e-mail address will not be configured as the "to" e-mail address. Use server-side processing to process your form instead of "mailto:".
Server-Side Technologies
PHP Ruby on Rails Try Ruby! Rolling with Ruby on Rails Adobe/Macromedia ColdFusion Adobe/Macromedia Flex Ajax Perl	Microsoft's .NET Framework Microsoft's Web Services Developer Center Active Server Pages Java Server Pages Java Web Services Developer Pack webservices.org UDDI

Chapter Updates

Thank you to the folks at Lane Community College for pointing out the following:

The last line in the table on page 212 should be deleted. There is no value attribute for the textarea element. As indicated in the paragraph above the table, the textarea element is a container tag and the intially displayed text is configured by placing the text between the opening and closing textarea tags.

Questions or Comments?

The author would like to hear from you!
Send an e-mail to webdevfoundations@hotmail.com

Chapter 6 Review

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Resources

W3C
W3C HTML Validator
W3C CSS Validator

Color Chart
Design Checklist
Fireworks Tutorial

A List Apart
SitePoint
Good Experience
Digital Web
Dreamweaver
FrontPage

ASP Script Code: formdemo.asp

The server-side script used in the chapter is written in VBscript using a technology called Active Server Pages (ASP). View the source code.