WDS16 - HTML Forms

In the last article we learned:

• HTML <meta> tag need
• All the attributes of <meta> tag including charset

As I said in the last article, today we are going to study something that we see on every website and that is forms. Yes, we see forms everywhere for the purpose of contact, submitting user information, online polls and many other places. So let's see how we can create the form with the help of HTML...

HTML <form> element

HTML <form> element defines a form. All the other form related tags/ form elements will be nested inside it.

There are different types of form elements in HTML which we can use inside <form> element. Let's see one by one:

<input> Element

It is the most important form element. <input> element has attribute type which desides what type of input you are taking.

• type="text" : Defines one-line text input field
• type="password" : Defines password list
• type="submit" : Defines submit button
• type="reset" : Defines reset button
• type="radio" : Defines radio button
• type="checkbox" : Defines checkbox
• type="button" : Defines button customisable by Javascript
• type="color" : Defines color input by using default color picker
• type="email" : Defines email input
• type="number" : Defines number input

and much more...

We are going to see almost all of this one by one. Forms are one of the most important and long concepts in HTML. Every input element has name attribute so that differentiate one input from other and also easily send information to the server.

Text Input

• Default width of text width is 20 characters. We will see later how we can modify this. 
• It is usually used to take the input of name, organization name, and other single lines short text.

Radio Button Input

• It enables the user to select one of given number of options.  To have this functionality, all the input fields must have same name attribute value.
• value attribute of each input will decide what information to pass when that option is selected.

 The Submit Button

• It is used to submit the form data to form-handler.
• Here form-handler means a server page which we accept this form data to store or process it.
• To decide this form-handler we have to specify action attribute in a <form> tag whose value will decide server page. If not mentioned, server page is same as the current page. In our examples, we will not mention it, as we are not saving this data which requires using backend technology.
• Another important attribute to <form> tag is a target. This specifies where the form will be submitted that is in the same window, new browser tab or new window. The default is same page window. To open in new browser tab, use target="_blank". That's all for this article. We will continue HTML Forms in next article. 

Till then _ #keepCoding _.