lecture 9: "ordinary" forms

Below is a form, one you might see on a typical web site. It is designed to gather information from the readers of the site. This is, in very general terms, what forms were included in HTML to do. I call forms that have this purpose "ordinary" forms, although as the next slide will show, not all forms do this kind of work.

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Name: Sex: Male Female	Email address: What topics are you interested in?: British Politics World Politics Political Theory

If you choose to include a form on your web site, its function will depend on what your site is about. Unlike with images, it's difficult to put forms like this into distinct categories as they all, in one way or another, gather information. That information could be personal information as suggested above. But it might be more driven by the visitor - for example, that plain box you see when you first log on to Google is a form, and the information it's collecting is: "what do you want to look for?". Or, perhaps you want to conduct an online survey or questionnaire for a research project. With all of these and more, forms can help.

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lecture 9: "ordinary" forms