Lecture 6 - Applications #3.2: HTTP

Digression: Forms in HTML

In HTML version 2, the idea of "forms" (and various related data structures) were introduced. These provided the basis technology for the recent explosion in "electronic storefronts" on the Web as well as several other innovations.

A form in HTML is an area of a Web page which is used to gather input from a human user. The information which is gathered can then be returned to the page's owner using a SUBMIT action.

The form is, as expected, delimited by a <FORM> and </FORM> markup pair.

The <FORM> markup has two important attributes:

ACTION: specifies the action URL of this form. Typically this is the URL of an executable CGI program, see later.
METHOD: specifies the way in which the ACTION URL is accessed. There are two methods, GET and POST.

Example:

<FORM
ACTION="http://ironbark.bendigo.latrobe.edu.au/cgi-bin/myprog" METHOD="GET">

Lecture 06: Applications #3.2: HTTP

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