Basic Forms - The <form> Tag

A form is used to submit information to the server.

A form is created using the <form> and </form> tags. The contents of the form are contained between these two tags.

The main attributes for the <form> tag are:

• name: the name of the form
• action: what happens when the form is submitted. This can be a CGI script/program, an ASP page, or a JSP page
• method: either POST or GET.
• enctype: the type of data being transferred. For a form collecting data, this attribute is not used. If the form is going to upload a file, then this attribute needs to be set.

Example:

	<form name='RegistrationForm' action='Register.asp.' method='post'>

POST has the the capacity to send much more data than GET. GET is limited to 1024 bytes, and converts the form data into QUERYSTRING format (name=value pairs separated by ampersands).

A QUERYSTRING is usually the part of the URL that follows the question mark (?). For example:

	http://local.yahoo.com/?location_city=Tucson&location_state=AZ

The part following the question mark contains one ampersand. Therefore, we have two name=value pairs. The variable names are on the left side of the equal sign, and the value of the variable is on the right. The first variable name is location_city and it has a value of "Tucson".  Te second variable name is location_state and it has a value of "AZ".

When a form is submitted to the server, or a URL is typed in the Address/Location bar, it is a Request. The page sent back by the server is a Response.