1. what are forms?
This lecture is devoted to only one topic, that of forms. Forms are another way in which you can begin to introduce some interactivity on to your web site. They are also the first thing we have seen which can be used to receive information back from your visitors.
Anyone who has browsed the Web, at even a casual level, has probably encountered forms. There are two main elements to a form, boxes and buttons. Here is one of each:
There are a great many things you can do with forms, and that is what this lecture is about.
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2. this lecture
It's important at this stage to be clear about what this lecture can and cannot do. As with other areas of Advanced Web Techniques, this is only an introduction to the possibilities of forms, although towards the end of the lecture I will explain how you can take this further.
There are two distinct aspects to using forms. These are:
- placing the form boxes and buttons on the page (including how to format them, style them and so on)
- establishing what happens when someone submits or sends the form.
This lecture concentrates on the first of these. Not every form is designed to be sent - form elements are in fact quite versatile and can be used for many other purposes (I will explain this in a few slides' time). But it is what happens when forms are sent that can be trickier. Later slides will provide an introduction, but please bear in mind that's all I can do in this course due to both technical constraints and time constraints.
If you do intend to take web design further, enhancing the interactivity of your site will be one way to go. Technologies such as PHP and SQL plug web sites into databases, meaning that, potentially, pages can be delivered back to visitors depending on information they have previously sent. Big interactive sites like Amazon or thetrainline.com work in this way. But despite the extra complexity of the processing of the form, they still use the same basic techniques to get the form on the page in the first place. So this lecture will give you valuable foundations for future study - and if that doesn't convince you, a form is a compulsory element of the Advanced Web Techniques course work!
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